The extra effort it takes to decode rot13 is an incentive to try and figure things out on your own. I really like this feature, as anything that’s only one click away is a huge temptation to go and click it, and ruin what I might have really enjoyed finding out on my own. Rot13 is one of the few instances that allows my akrasia to benefit me.
If you do end up using another web service, please operate on only the alpha characters, not punctuation. Basically, still rot13 but with the links. ﾬﾏﾐﾖﾓﾚﾍﾌﾋﾐﾚﾑﾜﾍﾆﾏﾋﾘﾐﾗﾚﾍﾚ is much more jarring on the eyes and attention-grabbing than guvf fgevat bs grkg. But more importantly, it lets you keep markdown when you rot13 something. If you want vgnyvpf, you can write *italics* directly in. If you obfuscate punctuation (especially spacing) than it is absolutely impossible to figure out where to put the markdown after you encode it.
Honestly I’d skip the middleman and go straight to spoiler tags. Here’s the CSS code for spoilers tags on reddit. Lesswrong uses the reddit engine so this would be incredibly simple to implement. Just a matter of getting site consensus and showing it to whoever runs the site. (Lesswrong admin, can you implement this please?) Alternatively, you can hijack the link markdown: Hover for a major Spoiler. This looks like [Spoiler](http:// “Spoiler text here.”).
A few things:
The extra effort it takes to decode rot13 is an incentive to try and figure things out on your own. I really like this feature, as anything that’s only one click away is a huge temptation to go and click it, and ruin what I might have really enjoyed finding out on my own. Rot13 is one of the few instances that allows my akrasia to benefit me.
If you do end up using another web service, please operate on only the alpha characters, not punctuation. Basically, still rot13 but with the links. ﾬﾏﾐﾖﾓﾚﾍﾌﾋﾐﾚﾑﾜﾍﾆﾏﾋﾘﾐﾗﾚﾍﾚ is much more jarring on the eyes and attention-grabbing than guvf fgevat bs grkg. But more importantly, it lets you keep markdown when you rot13 something. If you want vgnyvpf, you can write *italics* directly in. If you obfuscate punctuation (especially spacing) than it is absolutely impossible to figure out where to put the markdown after you encode it.
Honestly I’d skip the middleman and go straight to spoiler tags. Here’s the CSS code for spoilers tags on reddit. Lesswrong uses the reddit engine so this would be incredibly simple to implement. Just a matter of getting site consensus and showing it to whoever runs the site. (Lesswrong admin, can you implement this please?) Alternatively, you can hijack the link markdown: Hover for a major Spoiler. This looks like [Spoiler](http:// “Spoiler text here.”).
Those polls are awesome.