201410210620 2jtoce

Status: solved. The community read the words in 2014; this write-up accounts for every other cell as well.

The layers. The body is 126 tokens of hexadecimal. They decode to 1,004 characters of Base64, that to 752 more hex characters, and those to 376 bytes: 18 lines of 19 characters, separated by CRLF, with nothing left over. There is no cipher at any step.

The grid. The first and last lines are a < followed by 18 #. Each of the 16 lines between them is a label, a #, 16 inner cells and a closing #. Read top to bottom, the labels spell the subreddit's own name, A858DE45F56D9BC9.

The key. Each label is a hex digit, from 4 to 15. Slide each row's 16 inner cells left by that many places, wrapping around, and the words line up. The two < corners point the way: sliding right gives nothing.

As posted, the letters of the words (in blue bold) are scattered across the rows:

<##################
A#249Z#O5XFMHJ#ZE2#
8#X#S#M8AGN#N#BSY8#
5##CJYVV#E#GH#QC#T#
8#J#I#56DD3#W#A#N##
D#N1#O#Z#L#E9BS1E##
E#E#5O#KE#L#U1QPK##
4##BCG5#Y#7#A#VH#K#
5##T#OIW#E#C#N#J#W#
F##5#F#S#E#3#O#KRF#
5##O#460X#GI#W#I#A#
6#K#L#O67RASG#E#G##
D#58#R#WX#J#DZQPQI#
9##0M3T1MPM2H2QL#S#
B#Z#EXKJPQH6594DUZ#
C#####B###HW5QTR###
9#G#YOU#9RF1#AMOUN#
<##################

With each row slid left by its label (the number after the arrow), the same cells form nine words, each closed in a box of #:

        ##################
A  ←10  #HJ#ZE2249Z#O5XFM#
8  ←8   #N#N#BSY8X#S#M8AG#
5  ←5   #V#E#GH#QC#T#CJYV#
8  ←8   #3#W#A#N#J#I#56DD#
D  ←13  #1E#N1#O#Z#L#E9BS#
E  ←14  #K#E#5O#KE#L#U1QP#
4  ←4   #5#Y#7#A#VH#K#BCG#
5  ←5   #W#E#C#N#J#W#T#OI#
F  ←15  #F#5#F#S#E#3#O#KR#
5  ←5   #0X#GI#W#I#A#O#46#
6  ←6   #7RASG#E#G#K#L#O6#
D  ←13  #PQI58#R#WX#J#DZQ#
9  ←9   #2H2QL#S#0M3T1MPM#
B  ←11  #94DUZZ#EXKJPQH65#
C  ←12  #TR######B###HW5Q#
9  ←9   #1#AMOUNG#YOU#9RF#
        ##################

The words. Seven run down the columns and two run along the bottom row. Read left to right, they are:

Where	Words	Reading
3	NEW / EYE5	"New eyes": 5 stands for S
7	NO / ANSWERS	"No answers"
11	STILL / W3AK	"Still weak": 3 stands for E
13	TOOL	"Tool"
bottom row	AMOUNG / YOU	"Among you", in A858's own spelling

Put together: "NEW EYES. NO ANSWERS. STILL WEAK. TOOL AMOUNG YOU." The grid only fixes the nine words; how they group into sentences is the reader's choice.

• New eyes fits the date. The post came about a day and a half after a wave of newcomers reached r/Solving_A858 on 2014-10-19, when the sub saw 294 new posts and comments in a single day.
• No answers and still weak read as a jab at the solvers: plenty of new people, and the bulk posts still unsolved.
• Tool among you can be read as "there is a fool among you", or as "one of you is working for us". The post gives no way to tell which.
• The spelling. The digits for letters (5 for S, 3 for E) are the same style as A858's hand posts of May 2014 (24sf75 writes H3LL, IHAV3, PUZZL3). AMOUNG turns up again in 3j99nf in 2015 ("amoung the trash"), so it is A858's habit rather than a slip in this one post.

The boxes. Two words stacked in one column share one # between them (NEW/EYE5, NO/ANSWERS, STILL/W3AK), and AMOUNG and YOU share one in the bottom row. A box has no corners: its walls are the cells directly above, below, left and right of the word's letters. Drawing those walls around the nine words predicts 77 # cells, and the grid has exactly 77 #, all in those places. So the 256 inner cells are 38 letters of message, 77 walls and 141 filler cells.

The filler. The other 141 cells carry nothing:

• They are spread evenly over A–Z and 0–9: all 36 characters appear, 105 letters to 36 digits, close to the 26 : 10 an even draw gives.
• They are not typed by hand: neighbouring keys and doubled characters are as common as in a shuffled copy, in the posted order and in the slid order.
• They hide no words: no run of five or more filler cells, along rows, columns or diagonals in either direction, spells an English word, even allowing 3 for E and similar swaps.
• They are not the output of .NET's new Random(seed) drawing one character at a time. Every seed from 0 to 2³¹ − 1 was tried, in eight fill orders, and none fits (a planted test case was found).

S0M3T1M. In 2014 a commenter noticed S0M3T1M ("sometim…") in the row labelled 9, shown highlighted above. The S is the last letter of ANSWERS, then comes a wall, then 0M3T1M from the filler, and then PM rather than an E. A run that long is rare in shuffled filler (about 1 in 1,000), but the pattern was picked after it was spotted, and it does not finish as a word. It reads as chance, not as part of the message.

When it was posted. The bulk posts had been coming every two hours, at :44, with titles on Pacific time. This post came at 21:20 UTC, titled 0620 on a UTC+9 clock. Two minutes later the bulk posts restarted hourly at :22 on the same UTC+9 clock (2jtokr, titled 201410210622). The hand post came out of the freshly restarted program, using its time-zone setting. The community solved it on IRC in about seven hours.

Verdict. A hand-made word puzzle, aimed at the newcomers: nine boxed words, rows slid by the subreddit's name. Every byte of the post is accounted for, and there is no second message in it.

Earlier the same year, 24sf75 and 24tmeo addressed the same solvers in grids of their own.