rot13.htm

Rot-13 Support

Rot-13 is a simplistic encryption routine that rotates the
English 26 character set by 13 places... so "A" becomes
"M", "B" becomes "N", "Z" becomes "L", and so forth.

Why is this done? Some jokes, stories, etc. are so lewd,
bawdy, or otherwise offensive that authors of such material
kept getting flamed every time they posted such messages.
Rot-13 was developed as a way to "hide" the offensive
material. Anyone with a simple decoder, or even a blank
piece of paper, could decode the message, but in so doing,
the reader was acknowledging the he or she understood the
potential offensiveness of the message. A sure way to get

seriously flamed in Newsgroups is to flame someone for
the content of a Rot-13 encoded message. The feeling is,
if you pressed the button to decode it, you acknowledged
that it may be offensive in nature.

Note: This button will not be available if you have selected
"MAIL" in the Service: field of the Compose New Message
dialog box, or if you are replying to a message via e-mail.

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