2012 Soompi Forums Holiday Present Hunt: Win Prizes!

[Guest A180585]

Ahhhhh....found 2 and 3 but am so stuck on 1 hahaha I kow what it is but can't find the present! Nooo!!! Cannot give up now!

[Guest aaimints]

lordbordem said: Ah! So you were the amazing person that found the hint before i did and without cheating like i did  @-)

When i was asking for present confirmations, @melkimx mentioned that someone got all the presents as well but without the weird cheating method i used. 

[Guest chris4soompi]

found hint 2 & 3 but can't find hint 1! ~X(

[melkimx]

Time's up!

12/29:

Q.

 

A. http://forums.soompi.com/discussion/comment/11414724/#Comment_11414724

Explanation: You needed to know a little bit about K-Pop to get this one (or at least be willing to figure out that it was a certain nine-member girl group). I thought that most people should have known that these were the legs of SNSD in their iconic music video, "Gee." SNSD does have an official thread, but as I said, I wouldn't put the present in the middle of a very long thread without giving some more specific indication about its location. If you looked at the image file name, you would see that it was titled "ye11ow.jpg". 11 is the hint about the page number, and "yellow" meant that you should look in the thread of the girl in yellow -- Sooyoung.

12/30:

Q. _  _ and future... 1 3

A. http://forums.soompi.com/discussion/comment/25402081/#Comment_25402081

Explanation: Most people seemed to get the phrase, which was "Past present and future." Without leaving any more indication than that, I'm told a lot of people went looking for time-related threads, which wasn't necessarily my intention. My intention was that you should think about the words "past present" in a different light, and that hopefully you would look at the pages of our earlier rounds for the past presents (gifts). "1 3" was an indication to look at the first round, third hint (the rose gold watch). And then -- this is again where I lost more people -- I put another clue in that thread: a recipe for Thai iced tea, to direct you to the thread in the food forum.

Thankfully, lordbordem alerted me that I was being a jerk (I mean, not in so many words) so we worked together to come up with an additional hint to lead people to the right path. He posted a picture of the orange present with teal ribbon, hoping that it might jog the memory of those who had participated in past rounds and send them back to the rose gold watch thread.

12/31:

Q.

 

A. http://forums.soompi.com/discussion/comment/25435230/#Comment_25435230

Explanation: If you knew how to use Google Image Search, you could have just dragged the picture and found out that it was a picture of (I think) some policemen guarding the hospital where the Duchess of Cambridge was recuperating from pregnancy sickness. Otherwise, I have no idea how you would know what it was. To an American like me, they look like police people from some European country... anyway, seemed like this hint wasn't difficult for most people.

Results:

Five people returned correct results, two of them before lordbordem posted his hint (wow)! I also put another entry for those from this round who also returned correct results from previous rounds. Running the results through random.org, I got:

limitlessdreams
heartsongs

Congratulations! I'll be contacting you shortly, so please check your PMs!

Again, my apologies about the second hint in this round. I don't mean for the hints to be so easy that everyone can figure them out, but I see now that this one was poorly written. If we run this type of game again, I'll work with someone in advance to make sure the hints can be cracked.

[Guest GrapeappleTree]

Tried to do this round for fun, to test my skills, but you got me good there with Hint 1, it drove me crazy, I was all over the map with ideas, but none proved to be right! haha I was thinking waaaay too complicated, I was thinking about G.NA among others, as it's a Gee (G) pic..and Gee which is similar to omona , but you only showed lower part of the picture, so I thought split omona in half, and take away 1st part, and I'm left with NA, so G NA Also thinking about Wonder Girls - Nobody..or Taetiseo, as it's kind of 1/3 of SNSD in the picture (head and torso missing)

[Guest lordbordem]

@melkimx
Ahahaha don't make me look like an enemy~ i may have been annoying but certainly i worded my complaint better than "jerk"  8->
Anyway it's been fun the last couple days solving all these puzzles and thank you to @melkimx for writing up all these interesting present hints. Certainly made me think for quite a lot of them and i happen to be an avid puzzle fan so that's no easy task.
Congratulations to all the winners~ The great computer gods shone upon you and the Random Number Generator giveth $50 coupons to spend~ lucky buggers 8->

I should also post how i got Hint 2 in the 3rd round since it's over now just for interests sake

Alternative Solution activate

1. Google and find a script that runs a program that goes through a website and downloads images according to a set combination of rules
2. Find a script and modify to meet my needs
3. Look through all the previous present pictures and figure out the number pattern
4. The actual image file name appears to be random but is always a number combination from 3 digits to 6 digits long
5. Only one instances where the name starts with 0*****
6. Ignore instances where numbers have any 0s at the start (Including this would increase the search times expotentially)
7. Setup script to go through the server "http://d1i45kki000yqu.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/12" 
8. Start from 551.jpg to 1040.jpg to test script
9. It successfully finds the prior two presents and the links searched through the forum links to the relevant thread
10. Start from 1.jpg and cycle through to 10000.jpg for first pass
11. Let the computer execute on script
12. It finds an unknown present picture at 294.jpg
13. Soompi search database doesn't update for a day and thus forum search has to be delayed till Soompi forum DB update

[YOOJIN.]

I knew hint #1 was gonna be in a SNSD thread.
I checked few of them. Then I stop.
How come I didn't look through Sooyoung's thread?

[Guest forlease]

i only found one present per round, but it was fun! and time consuming. ^^

[Guest limitlessdreams]

@melkimx Thank you so much for coming up with this present hunt again. I had a lot of fun (though a bit of frustration too hahaha).
@lordbordemIf it weren't for your hint...I wouldn't have solved the hint, so ^^ Thanks again for your help! I was wondering how you figured out the present without finding the thread, haha.
The present hunt has been really fun! I hope it can continue (:

[Guest A180585]

Awwww....I got to Sooyoung's thread but got lazy after the first 5 threads hahaha darn me! Almost had all three. Next year then! This was fun!

[Guest aaimints]

didn't win but had so much fun lurking the soompi forums heheh.can't wait for next year's!!

[Guest sarangsarangsarang]

Thanks for another great present hunt, melkimx! Congrats to all of the winners

I was on the right thought track for the other two hints...but I gave up on the last round. Doh! Still, I completed 1 round and found 6/9 presents...that makes me happy

[neha200]

wow. It was really clever...I would've never thought to look at the url for the snsd picture...that one just screwed me up. Haha, but I always have fun looking at the answers and explanations. :DAnd now I know you can drag the picture for google search. woah! lol, I never knew you could do that. :DThanks for all the fun. ^^ and congrats to all of the winners.

[melkimx]

@lordbordem, oh sorry! yeah, i know you never said anything like that; it's just what i felt after i looked at the hint from another perspective, and i was like, "oh, that's not as easy as i thought it would be."

anyway, just handed out the gift certificates; let me know if there's a problem (in one case i mistakenly issued a $3 GC instead of $50 so that's probably the email that person received; sorry but i fixed it)

glad people had fun, felt really sorry that not everyone could win T_T but now you know how it'll go for the next hunt... whenever that may be!

[Guest sarangsarangsarang]

but now you know how it'll go for the next hunt... whenever that may be!

Can we have an Easter egg hunt???

[Guest krazyasian]

confused?