It tends to be rather hurtful to the recipient. If it were in good jest, I think he would've contacted the OP prior to ask if it was ok.

Anyhow, I'm heading off. I'll see you folks later.

See ya!

Quiz for all: What 1970s hit song's title has the cryptographic pattern ABAAB ACB?

Hint: I'd tell you the artist, too, but that would give it away!

Ooh, interesting.

Unfortunately I don't know any music from the 70s. Or in general, really.

Ah, that's a shame... I'm guessing you didn't attempt my music-themed puzzle from 2 months ago.

Lilli Lui? :)

Sorry, no banana.

Nope, by the time I got there it was already solved.

But it fits...

probably not really a song

If you write a song called that and post it on YouTube within the next 24 hours, I'll give it to you.

@A.Mirabeau the cryptogram solver helped me :)

lol

you got it?

yes, but not without help :)

I cheated

I'll take it, if there are no other answers.

I'm still thinking. Might be able to recognize it.

wait... is it by BAAB?

Yes. Very yes.

@Sconibulus I don't see how he directly was being rude. I don't think of the parody to be belittling/rude/offensive at all. But I understand your guys's points of views better now, thanks. Am I at least allowed to make fun of my own puzzles?

@LukasRotter Sure, the Be Nice rule doesn't disallow self-deprecating humour.

if(solution){ Ignore&&AddPuzzle() didn't seem rude?}

Rand al'Thor is a jerk.

^ See? :-P

@Randal'Thor careful, people in Arqade have been banned for things like that

Now it's on the starboard :P

mostly Gnomeslice

rand's a mod, he can't be banned... :P

@Mithrandir It won't be after I've cleared the stars on it ;-)

@LukasRotter Well, of course! There's nothing wrong with that.

Yeah, making fun of your own stuff, or with permission aren't problematic at all

But posting something that really doesn't seem like a puzzle, but does seem like a mean-spirited joke in retribution for a downvoted answer isn't really what we want here.

@Randal'Thor must really hate the repcap.

Just in case anyone is unaware, a "cryptographic pattern" is any encoded letter string in which one letter in the ciphertext always corresponds to one and exactly one letter in the ciphertext.

For example, the cryptographic pattern of REFEREES could be ABCBABBD

@A.Mirabeau I think Sconibulus figured it out :) the song

Sure, just giving the others one last shot.

Just looked it up using Sconibulus' hint. Wouldn't have recognized it otherwise.

Ah gotcha

(But I did get the band from that hint, so I'm proud of that. :P )

Nice, in any case

@Sconibulus I don't see how? I interpreted as "If the correct solution has been posted, ignore it and post your own loop-hole answer" (it was ADD_NEW_ENTRY, not AddPuzzle). Doesn't seem rude to me, honestly.

@LukasRotter No, that's in the "CSV section".

It's referring to the wordlist itself.

Oh, nvm.

So it's effectively saying that MD was just adding random words to invalidate any solution.

Once again, insulting.

@Randal'Thor Wow, how long did it take you to find that?

I need to withdraw from the room shortly, so I'll post this hint in case people still don't have the answer to my question:

The title of this song is featured in the lyrics to the immediately preceding #1 hit, which was an extremely well-known Freddie Mercury composition.

@Deusovi I dunno, half a minute?

@A.Mirabeau Ooh, nice hint.

I think that one might've given it to me. Even I know that one.

So in the flair, after you reach 10k, it doesn't say like '10.5k', like it used to say '9.7k'?

Nah, says "10.5k" for me.

Hmm. It updated the badges for me but not the rep?

Oh, for the flair! Duh, for some reason I was thinking you meant in the chat.

Yeah, I guess you're right.

Cool, it just went and said 11k!

It said 10k in my profile.

@GarethMcCaughan You have officially become my nemesis.

huh... I can't vote or see vote totals on meta anymore right now

@A.Mirabeau I know this one!

it looks like I can still edit and ask

@GarethMcCaughan Not only do you scoop me on every puzzle I try to solve, but you also solve my puzzles in next-to-no-time... :(

@GentlePurpleRain FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT

and now I can't vote on puzzling either... puzzling was working when I initially posted, I'd checked

Weird!

hmm... reviews are also breaking... something's probably going wrong with my connection

strange

or maybe this is what being banned feels like

I doubt someone banned you - unless it is accidental...

@GentlePurpleRain waits to see Gareth's rep drop to 1 :-P

@MariaDeleva Oops! ... <jk>

haha :)

Actually, it looks like something broke the javascript I'm trying to use, probably just had a cached copy for a little while on Puzzling

StackExchange object is coming back undefined

@Sconibulus Oops! ... <jk>

Are puzzles that have a fairly long story just for atmosphere but the story contains no hints/vital parts considered bad quality?

@LukasRotter I wouldn't downvote just for that reason, if the puzzle itself is good.

@LukasRotter But I certainly wouldn't encourage the practice.

@GentlePurpleRain Ok, maybe I'll just make a steganography part out of it to justify it a bit more :P

I'm fairly neutral towards it. Stories are nice, but don't make them too long if they're irrelevant.

@GentlePurpleRain sorry (but not that sorry). You still have the chance to scoop me on the Sorns and their Ransom...

@LukasRotter I prefer there to be not too much unnecessary material -- unless the whole point of the puzzle is to find the wheat among the chaff.

@LukasRotter To be clear, I think stories often add something to a puzzle, and a relatively short story (3 or 4 paragraphs) can make an otherwise dull puzzle much more interesting, but if I have to read several pages of irrelevant text just to get to the meat of it, that seems like too much to me.

Yep, same here.

I like short stories. Long ones - I rarely read them

Review audits in the First Posts queue are easy to spot if you remember everyone's avatars :-P

I am going to sleep, hoping that tomorrow my puzzles will be solved. :)

I'm planning on making a puzzle that requires the solver to view posts from puzzling.se, but I guess that would also be badly received because of the self-contained policy (and possible deletion of the posts) :/

Couldn't you make snapshots of these posts? Is it appropriate for the puzzle?

@MariaDeleva I'm afraid I can't, because the solver is supposed to figure out what posts I'm referring to :/

I see. Perhaps someone else might have an idea

Good night! :)

We've had those before. I think that would be fine (as long as you're reasonably sure that the posts aren't going to be deleted for whatever reason)

@Deusovi I spy a tag war.

:P

@Emrakul Sorry, just rolled back your edit to the fortnightly challenge post. Someone else made the same sort of edit a couple of weeks ago, but quote formatting makes the tag formatting not work within the quote :-/

If the tag war is about puzzle-creation, I'm happy to wait until the type of puzzle is known.

At that point the puzzle becomes a puzzle-creation resource. (came here just to mention that to you, Deusovi, bye for now)

That's how it looks to me with quote formatting. The border of the tag just disappears.

@GentlePurpleRain Sometimes a bit of the story -- even if it seems to be irrelevant -- is a clue. ;-)

@Emrakul Yeah, gotta say, the "missing border" looks far better than what's there now. :)

@Emrakul But without a border around just the tag, it's not clear that it is a tag (and therefore a link). It looks like just bold text.

But it's still link coloured

and has hover

But that's much harder to notice.

If I'd seen that borderless tag and didn't happen to know why it looked like that, I'd assume tag markup wasn't being used at all, and try to edit [tag: ] into the post.

Fair enough... but at the moment, I look at it and assume someone screwed up the formatting generally... :)

Maybe we should just ditch the quote formatting altogether

..could bump the font size up on the current title/topic: #Current topic: / - ###*September 19th...

@Alconja Yeah, maybe that's the best option. But the quoted lines around the current topic help to set it off very clearly from the rest.

How about putting the lines in quotes (to make the borders thicker) but not the "Current topic" title? Like so:

Or just de-emphasising the rest a bit and bumping up the font of the current like so:

That could work too, if people really don't like the idea of block-quoted lines.

At least it makes the current topic stand out from the rest, albeit not so clearly segregated.