The Mystery of Three Quarters: Where is the dot?

[mrpoirot]

OK, now that we know (sort of...) that we are looking for an URL. Where does that take us? Again, I borrowed a title from an Agatha Christie novel for this thread. Here is what I think we have at this point:

First of all, if no guessing is going to be involved in finding the treasure I can only see two options moving forward.

First, and the most obvious, is that Lukas has hidden a complete URL, including the TLD in the stanzas. This means that most likely there will be a "dot" somewhere for us to find. But so far I have not seen anything that points in that direction. Where is the dot? If we could find the dot it would be a huge step forward. But until that happens, we might have to look into the other option...

Which is that if a complete URL is not involved, we are looking at a partial URL and that is when things become interesting. This means that he points to a "known" URL (e.g. xxxxx.com) in one way or another and then gives the extra path. This would involve using the forward slash character (xxxxx.com/yyy). And as some have pointed out, in stanza 4 we have: Spare no expense, search everywhere and a spare in bowling is marked with a forward slash. But what about search everywhere part? Well, in UNIX/LINUX the forward slash means the root directory and to search the root directory means that you search everywhere... (i.e. find /)

www.linfo.org/root_directory.html

Just my 2 cents.

[susb8383]

There were two different puzzles I participated in once that had urls as part of the solution.

One of them spelled out everything using a substitution cipher, including http:// .

The other just spelled out domaincomsometexthtml. He assumed everyone would know to put the slash and dots in the appropriate places to make it domain.com/sometext.html

Also...umm..I don't mean to offend, but I'm not sure starting a new thread for everything is great. Now there are multiple threads that people have to go to for a discussion on the same thing. This one doesn't really apply since nobody has specifically asked about the dot, but for the stanza discussions I have to go to two separate threads to read or leave a comment about one particular stanza. It would be better to have all of the stanza 3 discussion in one place on the thread that was started for that purpose. That's just MHO, of course.

[mrpoirot]

Aug 4, 2019 11:26:16 GMT -5 susb8383 said:

There were two different puzzles I participated in once that had urls as part of the solution.

One of them spelled out everything using a substitution cipher, including http:// .

The other just spelled out domaincomsometexthtml. He assumed everyone would know to put the slash and dots in the appropriate places to make it domain.com/sometext.html

Also...umm..I don't mean to offend, but I'm not sure starting a new thread for everything is great. Now there are multiple threads that people have to go to for a discussion on the same thing. This one doesn't really apply since nobody has specifically asked about the dot, but for the stanza discussions I have to go to two separate threads to read or leave a comment about one particular stanza. It would be better to have all of the stanza 3 discussion in one place on the thread that was started for that purpose. That's just MHO, of course.

Good point regarding omitting the "/" and "." in a URL. It might very well be the case here as well.

As far as topics/threads. I did not know that all discussions had to be in the specific stanza threads. Mods can merge threads if that is the case. I have created new threads every time I think I bring up a new angle on something. Thus, a separate thread. But again, if that is against the rules, no biggie if they are merged into the other threads.

[captnkush]

Not sure how well this fits but the founding wich is his band has a album called (form.) I noticed it earlier when i was digging around and it has ten tracks on it ( cuts possibly) just thought it odd for a music album to have a period after the title. Anyways just a thought .a mothers love strong and fawning could be her form also the tenth track is home wich could be a place that fits you like a glove ....idk just throwing some things around . Thoughts anyone?

[catherwood]

(casual lurker here). I'm not reading the stanza threads, because i'm not trying to crack specific clues, but I do enjoy reading the speculation about the overall search for a web address. The most secure thing a contest could lock down would be the direct IP address (number.number.number) to their server, rather than a domain name. DNS entries can be searched for ownership as well as the date the domain names were claimed, which could lead someone to make a connection to a puzzle owner. But if the domain name is not a big secret, then the path thru subdirectories might be a good puzzle trail -- *if* their server security can prevent brute hacking.

This reminds me of the classic mistake from an early online game, when players thought they were being given clues to a character named Coroner Sweborg, when in fact coronersweborg was pointing them to a website for Coroner's Web dot org (without the dot).