Many Second Life residents are known for their creativity and brilliance. That brilliance was challenged this week in a seemingly unsolveable puzzle that began with an email to Tenshi Vielle, SL designer/creator and blogger, by someone calling themselves "Bob Ross".

Vielle received the email on July 27th and posted to the SLUniverse forums asking for help solving what looked like a cipher. The email led her to a website, http://www.shanti-is-coming.com/, which contained a coded message.

The very active group at SLUniverse has worked for the past eight days deciphering each clue. Each time a clue was solved, a new one was revealed by the unknown website creator. Over 1760 replies to Vielle's original post have been posted, with dozens of people taking a shot at solving the puzzle of "Wut is Shanti".

Clue solving involved the collective brainstorming of the SLUniverse members, using dozens of strategies from rearranging simple anagrams to taking apart jpeg files, calling telphone numbers to retrieve messages and downloading PGP decoding software to decipher keys. YouTube videos and Twitter messages were also used to send messages to the group. At the time of this writing, the website had been left for the weekend generating 3 random photos and several different messages with a log in screen without a log in password given. All that is known is that "Everything will be revealed on September 6" and "Shanti Is Open".

Forum regulars, trying to think of answers to the September 6 date, posited that the site had something to do with SLCC, the Second Life Community Convention, which several of the people at SLUniverse are attending. When they began suspecting it was Stroker Serpentine (whose Latex and Leather Ball will be held on September 6 in Tampa Bay) creating the puzzle, the website responded with another coded message that said "thisisnotstrokersdoing" when deciphered.

 The word "shanti" means "inner peace" in Sanskrit, and several seemingly Buddhist messages have been a part of the game. A search of Wikipedia using "shanti" as a search term reveals a long list, among them a song by Madonna, "Shanti/Ashtanga", and the link to The Shanti Project, a group to help others will life-threatening illnesses.

The unknown website creator has revealed her or himself to have a sense of humor. Posts to the thread from the members of SLU have elicted responses from the creator via the website, notably a photo of Philip Linden and his employees outside the Linden Lab offices in San Francisco and a message "For the love of zero, Ms. Chung is not to blame" when the word "Antshi" is typed in the log in box.