Last year, I wanted to come up with something a bit different for hiding spoiler text so I came up with with a simple inline substitution cipher and then spent a day or two cleaning it up. For blogs like this one and Doug Talks Weird, it meant I could share stuff that was either spoilers or which I didn’t want indexed but it was pretty simple to break.
I also broadly shared it for anyone to use or break as they see fit. It wasn’t about being secure, it was about being sufficiently random so that there was intention in reading it. It basically just creates basic alphanumeric cipher that swaps, say
AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZz0123456789
into
aZe3FlOMUWgRt5G4kcKsJ61xu8HPC0h7nQmVXBzdfEwrT2ji9NIqYSpybLvADo
By doing so, this means if apply any sort of spoiler styling it won’t accidentally spoil it for folks who are doing searches or looking at it through a screenreader, etc.
Technically, I need to check and make sure it doesn’t completely hose folks using a screenreader.
The old method had me copying-and-pasting the code into every blog post which used it but over time I decided that was unnecessary. The old version meant that it was slightly likely that it would expose multiple spoilers on a page. I had already came up with a simple tagging system that used a 5-character code to make it very, very unlikely.
I upped it to 8-character code but I would consider it very unlikely to be a problem.
At any rate, if it works, this top-secret message should be sub-ciphered until you click on it to expose its ancient message.
eZV3ZVZ VWZxxN xc6WB RVWPl4 RVcWB ZPM k VWZxxN xc6W B800l4cP5 JZq.
Will it break old posts which used it? Nooooo clue.