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Your goal is to guess what Stack Exchange site I am.

Here's a clue to get you started:

[s] -> [f]

Feel free to edit my puzzle!

Good Luck! -yoshifanatic52

Note: Everything in this puzzle is intentional and part of the puzzle, except this note. Make sure you know what you're doing before editing.

Hint 1:

Tweet Tweet

Edit 1/Note 2 (In response to @IIRawCodeII's answer about the follower)... kind of revealing so spoiler'd:

Previously, I used this Twitter account for a puzzle in a D&D Campaign. There were actually 2 accounts created, one was mine (yoshifanatic52) and the other one (Torvatown Science). I decided I didn't want to go through the hassle of creating a new Twitter account (because I would have to make another email, etc) so I deleted all previous tweets and changed the name and username. I just forgot to unfollow yoshifanatic. So this explains the cryptic messages that may have misled many of you. I suppose I'll go fix it now...

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  • $\begingroup$ Is the puzzle to guess which website you, the op are, or what the clues point to? $\endgroup$
    – TrojanByAccident
    Commented Mar 13, 2018 at 1:50
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    $\begingroup$ @TrojanByAccident since when could OP be a website >_> $\endgroup$
    – somebody
    Commented Mar 13, 2018 at 2:45
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    $\begingroup$ @somebody the question literally says “guess what stack exchange website i am” $\endgroup$
    – TrojanByAccident
    Commented Mar 13, 2018 at 3:04
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    $\begingroup$ @IIRawCodeII Just added the tag, thanks. I didn't know about it. $\endgroup$
    – yummypasta
    Commented Mar 13, 2018 at 3:27
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    $\begingroup$ It was edited... Aww. I thought I had a lead... $\endgroup$
    – IIRawCodeII
    Commented Mar 13, 2018 at 3:27

5 Answers 5

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Trevor Powell did most of the work in his answer. He ended up here:

The final hint is the formula "v = 6a^3" or $v=6a^3$.

This requires two stages of interpretation. First:

The $v$ is a volume, as typical, and $a$ is some kind of length. It makes perfect sense that the length is cubed to get a volume. The six is not familiar from any volume formula, so let me ignore that. Without it, we get the familiar equation for the volume $v=a^3$ of a cube with side length $a$. The total volume is six cubes.

Alternatively:

Algebraically, $a^3$ is just the cube of the number $a$, so $6a^3$ is six cubes, whether any geometrical meaning is attached to it or not. Then one can just reinterpret the word "cube" from algebra to geometry to get the meaning "six cubes".

Then:

There is an SE site with its logo containing six cubes. And quite appropriately for the kind of hint given, it is Mathematics.

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    $\begingroup$ Nicely done! :D $\endgroup$
    – Trevor Powell
    Commented Mar 13, 2018 at 11:46
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    $\begingroup$ I wish I could accept both this and @TrevorPowell 's answer... Good work! $\endgroup$
    – yummypasta
    Commented Mar 13, 2018 at 13:58
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    $\begingroup$ Good job! Though, I wish it the puzzle was longer. But what about Torvatown Science? $\endgroup$
    – IIRawCodeII
    Commented Mar 13, 2018 at 14:26
  • $\begingroup$ @IIRawCodeII No idea. At the moment it looks like a red herring, but it might turn out to be a different animal altogether. $\endgroup$
    – Joonas Ilmavirta
    Commented Mar 13, 2018 at 15:25
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    $\begingroup$ @IIRawCodeII Oh... about that. I was using the twitter account for a puzzle in a D&D campaign... I didn't want to go through the hassle of making another one. TorvatownSci is a leftover. $\endgroup$
    – yummypasta
    Commented Mar 13, 2018 at 23:58
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More partial answer, work in progress:

As noted in Rupert Morrish's answer:

The question contains an HTML comment which is only visible when editing the question. That comment contains the apparently-encrypted text:

gh, lgh l wul aiv jeawglk sq ty uhfjon fsllw. gqmgjvwr.dxm/b7lufyos

The hint:

Hint 1 points toward Twitter, where there is a user "@YoshiFanatic52", who apparently started tweeting today, with tweets stating:

"My favorite salad dressing is straight-up vigener. Ugh, I can't type today, I mean vinegar of course!"

"KEY lime pie is my favorite food. Wait, that contradicts what I said before. I guess that means KEY lime pie is saltedhashbrown! -- @YoshiFanatic52"

-link-


"Vigener" is a reference to the Vigenère cipher, and we've been told that the key is "saltedhashbrown".

So if we decode the cipher text found above using that cipher and key, we get:

oh, and i put the vinegar on my caesar salad. cnfgrova.pbz/j7ljmull

This is presumably a reference to the Caesar cipher. The Caesar cipher is an alphabet offset, offsetting each letter by a constant value from 1 to 25. Since there are only 25 options, it's trivial to brute-force and find the result, but we can do better; we can make use of the [s] -> [f] hint in the puzzle. To convert 's' to 'f' is an offset of 13, so we'll go with that. A Caesar cipher with a 13 offset is commonly called ROT-13.

So if we ROT-13 the remaining still-encrypted part, we get:

pastebin.com/w7ywzhyy

If we visit that site, we get a document containing just: "v = 6a^3".

And.. I'm not sure where to go from there. If I was forced to give an answer right now, I'd guess that

the text we've been left with looks like a physics equation, relating velocity to acceleration. So perhaps the OP is https://physics.stackexchange.com/. Or https://mathematics.stackexchange.com/. But those are pretty tenuous.

...and that's as far as I've gotten, so far.

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    $\begingroup$ Joined this SE just to comment. Maybe it helps to explicitly state that the v = 6a^3 is complete nonsensical with standard interpretation of v=velocity and a=acceleration. $\endgroup$
    – DonFusili
    Commented Mar 13, 2018 at 9:50
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    $\begingroup$ gasp, could it possibly be mathematics.stackexchange.com? $\endgroup$
    – ALinuxLover
    Commented Mar 13, 2018 at 11:12
  • $\begingroup$ Agreed, @DonFusili! Or at least, it's not the usual "v=v0 + at" equation. The "physics" idea was only because I can't immediately think of any other context where your equation would normally have 'v' and 'a' variables in it. Maybe my brain will come up with something else once it's had some sleep. Electronics? Volts and Amps, perhaps? I don't know. The equation is going to mean something to somebody, I'm sure.. $\endgroup$
    – Trevor Powell
    Commented Mar 13, 2018 at 11:13
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    $\begingroup$ a^3 is the volume of the cube, so this might refer to volume of 6 cubes? $\endgroup$
    – SztupY
    Commented Mar 13, 2018 at 12:16
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    $\begingroup$ @SztupY so mathematics.stackexchange.com? Their logo is 6 cubes... $\endgroup$
    – Jurgy
    Commented Mar 13, 2018 at 12:31
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(Deprecated) There's a big part of the puzzle you all are missing out on

[This section has been confirmed by the creator to not be part of the puzzle. Please don't consider this as such]

(Partial Answer)

If you visit yoshifanatic52's Twitter page, you'll find he has two followers! One of them is me (so just ignore that), and the other is an organization called Torvatown Science. Its page is odd, to say the least.

There's a big clue though! Check this out...

TorvatownSci's bio states the following:

Torvatown loves to be tHe hErald of Science, Engineering And Light power. In our missioN statement, we stated that our engineerinG was unparallelled.

Take the capitals and put them in a sentence!

Then, you will get...

THE SEAL IN G *or it could be interpreted as * THE SEALING

But wait! There's more...

Look at the tweets! They read out the following:
1000010 01101001 01101110 01100001 01110010 01111001

01101110 01001111 01110100 01101000 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01010010 01100101 01100001 01101100 00101100 00100000 01100101 01110110 01100101 01110010 01111001 01110100 01101000 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 0

1010000100101000010001010101010101010100000100010010100001000000000000101010101010101011010101010101010110101010101101

01010100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110011 01110100 01001111 01010010 01100101 00100000 01110111 01101001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01000010 01100101 00101110

We've release a new and improved Iron Flask.
Purchase it at http://torvatown.coast.com!
Only 399.99!

The flask is near

The universe is about to expand.


Now, I have no idea what to do with the non-binary posts, but there might be a lead in the binary ones!


Put the binary though a Binary to Text converter...

And you'll get the following...

The stORe will Be.[Uncopyable]-nOthing is Real, everything is Binary (The square bracketed area is not actually in the puzzle, it's actually uncopyable text.)


I have a suspicion that the third from the top Tweet is supposed to be converted differently. I have no idea what to do with it though...

But, what could this all mean? I don't know, but it's why I'm sharing this will all you guys! This had a much deeper rabbit hole than expected. Hope this will progress our progress to this puzzle's solution!

(Also one final note, spoiler text is one big pain in the *** to handle)

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  • $\begingroup$ The capital letters from the text you converted from binary, rearranged form the word ROBOT. Maybe the robotics stack exchange page? $\endgroup$
    – Gustavo Gabriel
    Commented Mar 13, 2018 at 13:38
  • $\begingroup$ Interesting observation. $\endgroup$
    – IIRawCodeII
    Commented Mar 13, 2018 at 13:39
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    $\begingroup$ Sorry for the confusion... Just edited so no one else gets unintentionally thrown off tracks. $\endgroup$
    – yummypasta
    Commented Mar 14, 2018 at 0:22
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Working on the mutually incompatible ideas that:

[s] -> [f] is part of the key to the cipher, which could be ROT13.

and

the HTML comment in the question:

gh, lgh l wul aiv jeawglk sq ty uhfjon fsllw. gqmgjvwr.dxm/b7lufyos

holds the answer, but that doesn't appear to be anything in ROT13. "Tu, ytu ..."

So we then

Need to look at other possibilities for the cipher, including the URL-looking bit at the end.

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  • $\begingroup$ Good... You'll need the [s] -> [f] thing later. For now, look at the other parts of the puzzle. $\endgroup$
    – yummypasta
    Commented Mar 13, 2018 at 2:22
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Partial answer

When you edit the puzzle, you can find this in the comments:

gh, lgh l wul aiv jeawglk sq ty uhfjon fsllw. gqmgjvwr.dxm/b7lufyos

While I haven't figured out what cipher is used to encrypt this (Looking at the letters, it's probably not caesar. Tried rot13 based on s->f and didn't get anything either), we can see that the last part is an URL, similar to hosting/sharing sites with some sort of id code behind the slash.

.dxm probably translates to .com, and the site has 8 characters in its body. Possibly pastebin?

Other clues in the puzzle:

The "author" is listed as -yoshifanatic52, though that is not OP. And of course, the [s]->[f] bit.

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  • $\begingroup$ Good job, but there isn't a point in figuring out the site right now. For now, I can tell you to try doing some more exploration and trying to decode that message! $\endgroup$
    – yummypasta
    Commented Mar 13, 2018 at 2:27
  • $\begingroup$ Ah, but i figured knowing the site might give me a hint to what kind of cipher is being used here :P $\endgroup$
    – votbear
    Commented Mar 13, 2018 at 2:36
  • $\begingroup$ :||| "caesarean" $\endgroup$
    – somebody
    Commented Mar 13, 2018 at 2:46
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    $\begingroup$ TIL all these years i've been mixing up a cipher name with a birthing procedure $\endgroup$
    – votbear
    Commented Mar 13, 2018 at 3:12

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