14 DAY TRIAL // For those who doubt it, here is proof that there is more to the online community than worshiping cats and bouncing funny videos back and forth. Thus, a group of Ask MetaFilter members has recently helped a family solve a puzzle that was bugging them for nearly two decades.
The puzzle in question was basically a string of characters written down on index cards, Gizmodo reports. At a first glance, the characters did not appear to make much sense.
The riddle's author was a woman who passed away back in 1996 after being diagnosed with cancer, and who spent the last days of her life creating the index cards.
The puzzle ended up on Ask MetaFilter after member JannaK, i.e. the deceased woman's granddaughter, posted it there and asked that people help her and her family make head and tail of it.
She explained that, although they had been in possession of the cards for nearly twenty years, neither she nor her parents or cousins had managed to decipher them.
Not to prolong the suspense, here is what the puzzle was all about (according to MetaFilter users, of course): messages and prayers addressed to God.
Thus, it would appear that each letter was the first letter of a word, and when pieced together, the words started making a great deal of sense.
The internauts reportedly reached this conclusion after realizing the significance of a code written on the back of one of the cards.
“Please see that we are all happy and safe in our lives and work,” and “Thank you Almighty God for listening to my prayers and answering them,” are just some of the things the riddle's decoders claim are written on the index cards.
Some mistakes might have been made when matching the letters with the words they supposedly stand for, but, all in all, the MetaFilter members appear to have done a pretty good job helping JannaK.
“Holy cow! 14 minutes to solve the back of the card that has been bugging my family for 20 years! That is amazing!” the latter wrote in a message addressed to the folks that solved the puzzle.