Many people can decrypt parts of rot13 ciphertexts without conscious effort.
How does one happen to acquire this skill?
People are differently good at linguistic skills. My experience in yeshiva demonstrated this to me. Aramaic is a language related to Hebrew, and in yeshiva it is very, very often read and never written or spoken, nor are new thoughts generated in it. Hebrew is used in Israel, the outside world for Americans learning in Israel, so it will be read frequently, and spoken and heard sometimes. English will be how Americans communicate with each other, even when learning things in Hebrew or Aramic. Yiddish is heard and spoken to various degrees in different plac...
rot13.com is a service frequently used here to hide spoilers. I really hate it, though. If I had the time, I would build a simple, but much better alternative. Maybe somebody has more time to do that, so I'll share my rough specification:
The only important design problem I don't know how best to solve is making the encryption work for Unicode, with the following three constraints: making it a reciprocal cypher, outputting visually nice strings, and making it map ASCII to ASCII. One possible solution is to drop the constraint that it is a reciprocal cypher. For this service it is probably not crucial anyway: the ciphertext can be base64, with some escape prefix distinguishing it from plaintext.
After writing the above, I found this LW thread: Does anyone else find ROT13 spoilers as annoying as I do? There were several suggestions there, and two of the commenters, sketerpot and LightningRose even coded their own solutions to the spoiler problem. Each solution had some merit, and LightningRose's in particular was far superior to the rot13.com site I used to use, but basically, they only dealt with the third point of my proposal.
Is there anything like what I envision? Is anyone interested in building it? What changes or extra features would you like to see?