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A Letterboxing Community

Edit Clue Help

Many benefits can be gained by hosting your clue on Atlas Quest. Information about your letterbox such as its status or repairs that are needed will be displayed right in your clue and updated automatically whenever you change such information. No knowledge of HTML is required, but you may still upload a photo to include with your clue and adjust the colors to fit the theme or feel you want to convey. In addition, when you view your own clues, you'll see a small hit counter in the upper right corner allowing you to get an idea of how many people are viewing your clue! (The hit counter is for your own personal use and is not displayed to others that view your clue.) This help page explains additional ways you may customize your clue that are not quite so obvious.


Colors are simple as choosing what color you would like each element of your clue to be. High contrast colors are easiest for others to read such as black text on a white background or white text on a black background, but ultimately the decision is up to you. Low contrast colors such as green on red may be difficult for many people to read, but it may be impossible for color blind people to read!

Text Color All text in your clue uses this color by default.
Header Color The titles used in your clue will be displayed using the header color. This includes the name of your letterbox, along with the headers 'Directions' and 'Clue' if you use them.
Link Color If you use links in your clue—any word that begins with http://, https://, ftp://, or mailto:, the word will automatically be turned into a link and displayed in the color specified here. If a user moves the mouse cursor over the link, the link will use a bold font and the cursor will become a hand to indicate the link may be clicked.
Background Color The background color should have a strong contrast against the other colors and will be the dominant color on your clue.

Clue Box

This box is the meat of your clue. Tell people a little about where the letterbox is located, provide directions, and the actual clue itself. Or not. It's up to you! Provide any information you feel others need or would find useful, no more, no less.

This text box supports several HTML tags including: <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, <h5>, <h6>, <i>, <b>, <u>, <hr>, and <pre> that allow you to italicize text, emphasis text in bold, and among other uses.

For those of you who are familiar with HTML, use the tags exactly as you would expect. For security purposes, the tags must not contain any extra characters, style elements, JavaScript, or anything else. Even including a single space in the tag will render it inoperative, so type the opening and closing tags without any extra characters.

For those of you not familiar with HTML, these tags are very simple to use. Surround the text you want to format with an opening tag (e.g. <i>) and a closing tag (e.g. </i>). So to write the following line in your clue:

The dog jumped over the fence.

You would type this line into the text box:

The dog <i>jumped</i> over the fence.

The <b> tag works exactly the same, but replace the i with a b.

Some clues, take the Seattle Walking Tour for example, require columns to be lined up or formatted in a specific way, and that's what the <pre> tag is used. Normally, web browsers will take multiple spaces between words and bunch them together as a single space, but for tables with columns, this is not the desired behavior. In such a case, surround such text with the opening <pre> tag and closing </pre> tags and the web browser will display the spaces exactly as you type them. You shouldn't have to use these tags often, but they're here if you need them.

For more information about HTML codes, check out HTML Help. The message boards on Atlas Quest also support these same tags and more detailed examples of their use are provided.

And that's all there is to know about the clue text box!

Upload Photo

For many letterboxers, they hide boxes in locations that mean a lot to them. It might be anything from an amazing view to a strange-looking statue, and they'd like to share a photo of the place with people who look for their boxes. You can do that here.

Use the Browse button to find the image on your computer that should be displayed in your clue. The image must be either in a jpeg or gif format, and under three megabytes in size. Most digital cameras will take pictures that fit the requirements.

You do not have to check the box to delete the current image if you are uploading a new one—the old image will be overwritten automatically. If later you choose to not have any picture on your clue, leave the browse box empty and check the Delete Current Picture box.

To improve download times for people with slow Internet connections, your image will automatically be resized to a maximum of 300 pixels in length or width—whichever is longer.

When uploading a large image on a slow Internet connection, please be patient when you click the button to save the information on this webpage. A large image may take some time to upload to the server, and there will be no warning as this happens.

Most photos uploaded with a clue are decorative in nature, but if your photo is the clue, but sure to mark the button that says Photo is clue. By marking the Photo is decorative button, Atlas Quest will attempt to repress the photo whenever someone prints your clue to save otherwise wasted ink and paper.

Hide from Search Engines

Search engines such as Google and Yahoo scour the world's websites to make it fast and easy for people to find information. Some people, however, would prefer that their clues not be quite so easily accessible. Standard protocols exist to ask search engines not to include specific pages in their searches, and if you click this option, Atlas Quest will ask search engines no to index your Atlas Quest hosted clues.

Please note, however, that it is impossible to guarantee that a search engine will not respect the request and index the clue anyhow. Most large, well-established companies such as Google and Yahoo will follow such directions, but smaller, rouge competitors may not.

If you really want to make sure your clue does not get saved by a search engine, you'll need to either host the clue yourself behind a password protected page. You also have the option of making the letterbox only for people with a certain number of finds, and since search engines generally will not create accounts on Atlas Quest and list finds, those clues will be safe from them.