The code's solution...

ZZZZZzzzzZzZzZz

Cathead why u no respond?

Because no one got it right. :D

I'm going to stop this thread now, it's going a bit too slowly and we're just having wild guesses at this stage.

I'll send an explanation of the puzzle and a solution in a few minutes and decide what to do with the prize money.

Wow

So, the main body of the code was broken by Hippo. I thought it would be interesting to make a code based on letter frequency in a language. I had a quick research and saw that there is no definitive list for letter frequency because everyone writes differently and it's impossible to come up with a direct list.

So I started thinking about how you could make a definitive list and I stumbled upon Linotypes. These machines had keyboards which were ordered from most frequent to least. I simply reversed the order they used and used them as a key to create a code from our alphabet.

Then, to stop people from just using cypher crackers online (computers break these codes really easily) I had to reverse the order of the words.

So your hints in the coloured letters were "Linotype" and "backwards" which is easy enough. The first clue "frequency" backwards in morse code is self explanatory too. (Interestingly, Morse took into consideration letter frequency when he invented his code.)

The red letters spelled "red herring" which ironically was a very decent clue for the third question.

Now onto the actual questions:

The first was a flower, well, it was meant to be. I found it surprising that no one tried to map them out sooner, thought this would be much quicker. They were just points on a grid and they made a child's drawing of a flower. The consolation prize for this one would have just been all the flowers in my items page.

The second was essentially just a task set using the code, so once it was cracked it was very straight forward.

The third was the red herring. The words were nonsense. It wasn't even a riddle. Take the first letter of each word in the "riddle", unscramble them, and you get... "screwdriver": a random item in my items page. The red letters helped you here by telling you that there was a massive red herring (the question itself).

So the answers were:

1: flower

2: attack Duke

3: screwdriver

No one won but I had a lot of fun with this, especially on the first day (when no one was whining). I'll send out a few rewards/ consolations to people because I was really impressed and surprised at your tenacity.

Hope you had fun.

:D

Wow

Duhhh.... I feel kinda dumb.

Oh well, had a lot of fun. I really thought it would start with an F tho.