I'm surprised nobody's mentioned the Regex Crossword game site [0], it's shown up on HN several times [1][2] and has a fantastic user-submitted puzzle section (that includes the MIT Mystery Hunt puzzle [3]) and a puzzle builder.

0: https://regexcrossword.com/

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=regexcrossword.com

2: Most discussed posting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8674039

3: https://regexcrossword.com/playerpuzzles/8cbea27f-c4c5-4d11-...

This is a Mystery Hunt puzzle, so solving the obvious puzzle is only the first step of solving the puzzle. You will need to do something with the puzzle solution to somehow get a word or short phrase.

I remember doing this one by hand over a decade ago. Fond memories.

https://puzzles.mit.edu/

I really love this kind of thing. I made one called 'redoku' a long long time ago. It generates random challenges. Try it here: https://padolsey.github.io/redoku/

I loved this puzzle, spent hours to solve it.

What I don't like is the mystery hunt that follows. You don't know where to start, you don't know if the solution you found is correct, etc.

Even a after looking up the solution, it doesn't make me go "wow! That's brilliant". The final phrase is too short to be meaningful, it's not related to the game (at least, I can't get the connection), one of the words I didn't even know it existed in English (is it an abbreviation, perhaps? Is it American English?)...

A good puzzle poses a problem for you to solve. A regex puzzle? now you have two problems to solve.

Date is 2024 but this puzzle (slash form of puzzle) is quite old, I want to say a decade or so.

Wow. This is evil and lovely.

Edited - never mind, this is obviously random strings of characters.

I'm going to have to print this one out lol. Very creative.