Hi guys, it is time again for my summer of hacking It's really nice to be back, and see all you guys. All the encouraging emails from everyone telling me to come back really warmed my heart. Thank you all

To start things off, I want to cause a little trouble, and suggest a few easy but in my opinion nice changes:

1. Make the colors of the challenges logarithmic instead of straight, because we have so many challenges in the red, this should help. Try somehting like color = log(users) +1
2. Now that we have rankings (yeah! ) we could use them. Maybe have a few buttons to sort the challenges by their rankings. You can do an SQL join on the tables and then ORDER BY the ranking column. I don't know how you set it up, but that is the most straight forward way I can think of.
3. Maybe make the Vulnerable Code icon have a transparent background. I'm a nitpicker but it will really make it feel complete

That's it for now, feel free to add to this list, or argue with me. I'll add more as they come up.

Thanks again and I look forward to a good summer with you guys!

Talking of asthetics, I thought you may have mentioned the missing Stegano smiley and Information Gathering smiley (with no colour!). Which makes me think that maybe my web browser is not displaying these correctly. But I guess they appear like this with everyone???

Your points above are good, but they are just "nice to haves". While discussing the site (which is the best around in my opinion - by a long long way ) is nobody submitting new challenges anymore or is there an admin time an issue?? I just havn't seen any for a long time.

You a re very correct about the smileys. I would like to see that fixed as well.

I'm just saying this, beacuse the site feels in disrepair. Like people have stopped caring.

The little things used to be fixed all the time, but now, the IRC icon isn't working, the smileys are broken, no new inovation has happened in the year that I was gone (except for the voting system, but it wasn't used for anything).

I just want to see this site brought back to pristine condition.

Well I agree with both Chaosdreamer and paralax .. the site has taken on a little of a 'dormant' feeling.

There was a flurry of activity when some challs were deleted but with no new material coming in it feels like the site is stagnating a little. I would love to see some new challenges put up but not purely for the sake of having challenges on the board. I would love to see some more innovative challenges (like Phas's cryptos, Harley's crackmes) rather than challenges that people create to show how few people can solve them.

I won't rant on about this (as it is a bit of a pet hate of mine) but challenges should make people learn things. Anyone can write an impossible to solve challenge - writing one that is original and educational is more of a challenge than solving them normally. If its an admin problem (if you guys are too busy atm) I'm sure there are some people who will spare some time to help out a little bit. Ask the community here to get a little more involved - I think you will be surprised at how they react

</rant>

bb

I must agree too and I hope things will change soon...
The stegano smiley is broken since sometimes now and the new one would be better without the white background at least...

As bb said I'm sure too that there are people here who can help to administrate the site if theblacksheep and Erik have not many time for this.
This site is great. Please, don't let it die...

Well, yeah, you guys are d**n right !
In fact, atm, like Chaosdreamer said, I have exams, but, when I'll get them passed, hehe, I'll be back (though I try to come here as much as possible to check neww posts/pm's )
And, of course, if any help is needed with the site, don't hesitate to ask !
To conclude... long LIVE bright-shadows

what about a submitting smiley?
every 50 points you must submit 2 challenges to get a master smiley ;p
of course only good challenges will lead to such a smiley

but the most important thing is that the challenges must get more differently even if they are easier to solve

after my exams i will submit some but paralax you should also submit instead of complaining

Hi,

the point is that I simply "retired". In fact I don't have any time for things like this site. Even at the beginning I hadn't. But I was interested in it and it was very fun to expand the site, earn skills and make users happy. After some time we reached a point where everone was just complaining - ban this user, add challenges, remove them, ban that user, install a pm-sniffer against cheating, ban another user...
That's the moment it wasn't fun anymore. So I simply stopped wasting time on this project. I just come here from time to time to check my pms. TheBlacksheep is still around as he was before, so everything should work well - this site was his idea.
Nevertheless, thanks for that partly encouraging topic

Cu, Erik

Well Erik, that is very sad to hear. You might want to consider opening up the site as an open project. I'm sure many people would donate time and / or hosting of it, and you could hash the passwords so that people won't be able to cheat that way. I don't know exactly how the site is set up, but I'm sure with a little bit of effort it could be switched to community driven.

Again I'm sorry to hear you retired. I did as well, for 8 months, but I returned and I hope that you will too.

paralax

Today I have fixed the Information Gathering smilie and the stegano/ranking problem.
I have also added a little challenge.