RSS
An acrostic) is a type of puzzle commonly seen in the MIT Mystery Hunt. My team asked me to put together a tool to make it easy for half a dozen people to all work on the same acrostic puzzle at once.
A tool for a very specific sort of word puzzle.
What is this?
A non multi-user demo can be found here.
Thus Autocrostic was born, a web based tool that takes all the tedium out of the puzzle. Sadly the 2012 Hunt only had one acrostic in it so it only got a brief moment to be useful. Keying in the puzzle took a few minutes, and a few minutes later it was solved.
There is nothing too special about the code. If you do puzzles, you are welcome to add it to your team's arsenal. If you really want to read the code, there is a small bit of cleverness for making sure rapid keystrokes are not dropped and a fairly large hack to properly merge multiple client's data.
Setup
Source code can be found on github.
Server side, all you need is a web server with PUT enabled. If you don't have PUT, cgi post can be used instead.
The format for the puzzle is pretty self explanatory. Just compare the source with the raw text input.
After creating the raw input file, set the path variables inside the html.
Broken wikipedia link.