Trippy, Rusty and I were shocked to see just how many people were not aware of the ROT-13 cipher used to obscure hints on Geocaching.com cache pages. This really is a sign that Paperless Caching has become the method of choice for more and more geocachers. In the "Old Days" when we all used to print out every cache page, the hints were codeded using ROT-13 to make you work to get the hint. Some of us still try to decode it on the trail, but I think that population is fewer and fewer these days. So, here is some useful information about the code that we've honored with the January 2006 Geocoin Club Coin.

ROT-13 is a Caesar Cipher where the English alphabet is "rotated' on itself with a shift of 13 characters (half the length). This means that your decoder wheel (or geocoin in this case) is set so that A on the outside = N on the inside. Because it's been rotated 13 characters N in the outside = A on the inside. Pretty cool, huh? While this is very simple, it obscures hints, punchlines and spoilers just enough that you need to make an effort to read it as regular words, unless you've been conditioned to recognize words like gerr, ybt, pnpur, uvag, ab, Jnubbb!, and fbzrgvzrf.

Most of the text on the ROT-13 Geocoin is obscured in ROT-13. We didn't think it would be fair to do that to the Tracking Numbers or the activation codes, though - so those are still just plain text.

Here are some links for you to learn more about ROT-13.

Wikipedia's Definition of ROT-13
The Jargon File's Definition
LEETKey A Mozilla Extension that, amoung othe things, does ROT-13 translation.
ROT13.com A site to convert ROT13.



Let us know if you like to see this kind of information about the monthly coin designs. We'll work to make sure we do it every month if the response is good.