The purpose of rot13 is hiding of spoilers. An improvement over current situation should be in methods for hiding spoilers, not in methods for managing rot13, which is a lost purpose. (I realize the post applies to use of rot13 alternative on arbitrary sites, but that particular conversation shouldn't be on LW.)
What is needed is support for spoiler markup and hidden-until-activated rendering. This is how it's implemented as an extension to Markdown on Stack Exchange.
I agree that site-specific solutions are superior (if they are actually implemented). I agree that considering this, my original post was quite off-topic. Fortunately, my original off-topic thread about a proposed general solution was hijacked into an on-topic conversation about the best LW-specific solution. I think satt and Misha gave a quite acceptable temporary solution that would deserve some more visibility. Meanwhile, HonoreDB implemented my proposal (big thanks, HonoreDB!). So everything turned out fine.
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?