Hidden Message in Haley's Cypher?

[Chrismith]

So I was browsing through the OOTS page (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OrderOfTheStick) over at TV Tropes, and this item is found in the list of trope examples:


Bilingual Bonus (Sort of. Haley's aphasic gibberish is a cypher; solving it reveals a few good lines. On occasion, the encryption key, too, will reveal a secret message.)

Obviously we all know about Haley's code, but this is the first I've heard of a hidden message in the key. Is this true? Or is it just a coincidence in which the letters line up to spell BACON or something?

[Haleyintraining]

Everything was real words. See this for translations:
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4909

[Kish]

:smallconfused: Chrismith knows that. S/he is wondering about hidden messages in the translation key.

[Chrismith]

:smallconfused: Chrismith knows that. S/he is wondering about hidden messages in the translation key.

Indubitably!

[drengnikrafe]

What we need is for someone who decoded all of everything to give us the cipher key for each and every page... Or, at least sift through them all, and tell us if they see anything interesting.

[Schnitzel]

Maybe you should ask in the article's discussion page, perhaps the troper who added that example would shed some light.

[Vargtass]

If I remember correctly, the translation keys (at least sometimes) where built on phrases, i.e. if a plain text alphabet was encrypted, it would render a phrase (with all duplicate letters removed, of course). Once in a while, this phrase had something to do with the strip itself, sometimes it was classic encryption phrases, reminiscent of codeword exchanges. Otherwise, the use of such phrases are a convenient and common way to construct substitution cyphers, although it does introduce another weakness to the code. I think these original discussions can be found in the original decryption thread (What Haley Said).

[kabbor]

A couple of them were obvious phrases: the phrase came first, with duplicated letters omitted, followed by the remaining letters in, as far as we could tell, random order.

But most of them seemed to be random.

In addition, most (if not all) comics had at least one error in the crypting. Nothing could be gained by analyzing these errors either.

You are welcome to embark on a complete statistical analysis of Haley's blatherings, and we will welcome, criticize, denounce and flame all your hard work!

[NerfTW]

I think he said somewhere that the errors were intentional, to throw people off and make it slightly more difficult.

[Fawkes]

I would've said that, too. :smalltongue:

I distinctly remember one of the keys being "thequickbrownfxjmpsdvlazyg."

[herrhauptmann]

I don't know how the rest of you did your decoding, but before I saw the thread with the listed translations, I went through the comics, and whenever Haley had a short message with a seemingly preprogrammed response, I used the response and her answer to figure out what was being said.

examples:
Elan: You call it the trouser t-
Roy: Not the point!

Later, Roy mentions the trouser titan, and Haley starts to say something with words of 3-4-2-3-7 and 1 (with a dash after it) and Roy responds again 'Not the point!' Which let me know what Haley had said there, and gave me more of the decryption.
I personally never saw a pattern in the encryption, and definitely not a hidden message in the decryption itself.

[Tal9922]

I don't know how the rest of you did your decoding, but before I saw the thread with the listed translations, I went through the comics, and whenever Haley had a short message with a seemingly preprogrammed response, I used the response and her answer to figure out what was being said.

examples:
Elan: You call it the trouser t-
Roy: Not the point!

Later, Roy mentions the trouser titan, and Haley starts to say something with words of 3-4-2-3-7 and 1 (with a dash after it) and Roy responds again 'Not the point!' Which let me know what Haley had said there, and gave me more of the decryption.
I personally never saw a pattern in the encryption, and definitely not a hidden message in the decryption itself.

Well, you've been missing out as you'd know if you would just bother reading therough this one page before posting.

Anyway, I distinctly remember the encryption key for 393's, Haley's final strip before regaining her speech, saying something like "Haley speaks the truth" or somesuch, so it's reasonable to assume sopmething like this could be found in the other encryption keys as well.

[DraPrime]

When I first read the title of this thread I thought it said that there's a hidden massage, not a message.

[Lissou]

I'm actually getting all the keys to translate them (I'm not going to work on the translations of the strips themselves, yet, but I thought I'd translate the keys, when they have a meaning at least).
So far, I only found the "THEQUI/NCKBROW/QNFXJ(M)PSVLAZ(Y)D(G)" (strip 284)

/ meaning that the letter after the slash was used once instead of the "right one" (either by mistake or intentionally, I have no way to know, but I can tell you for instance N was used to translate F once instead of I, and as N translates to F, Rich did it the other way around, either intentionally or not. Same with L>Q)
The ones between parentheses didn't appear during the strip, but weren't too hard to guess. Still I'm putting them in a different way.

The hidden sentence obviously being "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog".
Which, incidentally, is going to get translated into "Voix ambiguë d'un cœur qui, au zéphyr, préfère les jattes de kiwis" in French, because that's the "font example" equivalent).

I'll keep you informed as I go along.

[Lissou]

Ok, I focused on those where she speaks a lot and got 2 more:

309:
HALEY(S)PKN(O)TRUWDZ(I)FBCGJMQV(X)
(No real reason to put I and X there and not the other way around, except that "if" is an actual word...)
> Haley speaks no true words (if?)

393:
FINULCRYP(T)OGAMEJ(B)XVWSQK*D* (with H and Z left)

> Final cryptograme (job?)

and that's it. Now I'm going to try the ones in which she speaks less. Considering I got all the letters there were to find midway through the strips where she talks a lot, I might find something there too.