[brocko]

I kinda rocked up to this contest halfway through so I've just been picking up the rules from as example as best i can. If I've been doing something wrong, please do tell ^_^;;

As for the explanation/rationale behind my answer:

Spoiler:

Dear reader,

There used to be this girl I really liked back in the days.
Establishes that the main subject matter is about a girl "back in the days". We're looking for something related to the past and some girl.

At the time lots of people were talking about her tales.
"At the time" (and "Back in the days") implies that that this use to be a popular area of discussion in the past but maybe not so much anymore, eg: some old thread/series that use to be really active.
"tales" i figured may've also been another clue if you intepreted as 'tails' for something furry related perhaps? or tales in the 'tales of x series', but it turned out this wasn't case and may've been a simple red-herring instead or me just overthinking things lol

A few years ago she suddenly disappeared though, and
This line finally establishes a timeframe of a "few years ago".

it left us all in tears. We only have some pictures to proof
her existence now. There were a few pictures in particular
that meant a lot to me. I've been searching and searching,
but I can't seem to find them anywhere. It's not like they
The only thing important you need to take out of these lines imo is something about pictures(image threads have a lot of pictures right? lol) and perhaps searching for them (hence my first answer with the anime/manga identification thread). The rest of it i intepreted as waffling and to provide the riddle with some personal flavour, which in itself could've been another clue as to the nature of the answer (eg: something melancholic that "left us all in tears") but i didn't pay too much attention to this tbh.

flew away, right? When I asked my friend, he only gave
me one code:

"11.17.217"

Can you help me out?
And here comes the biggest hint of them all, "11.17.217".
Of course the hard bit is finding out how to interpret these numbers correctly. In my case i looked at it as pseudo-directions of sorts.
Go to page 11 , go 17 posts down from page 11 and there you'll find post #217 of the thread. The numbers matched up well so i decided to run with it even if i could've been totally off track.

The only thing now was just to take shots in the dark and try to find the right thread(s) that match the clues from other parts of the riddle. Of course this all comes down to how one would interpret the riddle but the things that i took away were: "a few years ago", "left us all in tears", "suddenly disappeared", "pictures flew away", "tales", "pictures to proof existence" and "searching for pictures". Naturally some of these may've been on track while others may've off-track, but there's really no way to know so i was just gonna go down a list of possible contenders (looking for threads with atleast 11 pages or 217 posts was a tremendous help and greatly narrowed things down i must say). I was just lucky i managed to have struck the answer on my 2nd guess lol.


Regards,
...
The name is left blank, so I'm assuming the answer was to fill in the blank, hence the name of the poster behind the 217th post of the special thread would be the answer.
I wasn't sure about this so i provided two extra but different links to the post itself as a fallback.

I wasn't sure which one of the three was the definite exact answer, but if i really had to choose one, it'd be the member name since it fits with the riddles ending and has only one link compared to the the two different post links.

EDIT: Well Nightwish revealed that we're looking for a post so the exact answer would've either been
http://forums.animesuki.com/showpost...&postcount=217
or
http://forums.animesuki.com/showthre...12#post1431012
take your pic lol

Some of the answers before mine didn't have any explanations so i figured it wasn't necessarily required. If i do happen to be correct, i will elaborate on it however as seen above.