Multiple heated discussions have arisen over the past months with regards to the unsatisfactory experience TBS / challenges communities in general have been giving you. Your arguments include -

1. The presence / lack of teamwork.
2. The presence of a platform for people to cheat. (Forums / PMs)
3. The unsatisfactory quality of challenges.
4. The lack of a "fun" element in the midst of the "serious" competition in challenges.
5. Useless posts.
6. The lack of development grounds.
7. Ranking.

Building on the philosophy that YOU decide how much fun YOU want to have while not compromising the learning element, and that if you must cheat, at least cheat while knowing how the challenge is done, a new idea is born.

Brought to you by theAnswer, matrixman and yours truly, a proposal that will revolutionize the challenges community -

1. The presence / lack of teamwork.
Some people hate teamwork, others love it. Bringing to you, a new challenge framework with DuoChallenge(tm) Technology - individual challenges and teamwork challenges! Individual challenges will generally be easier and can be done with sufficient effort on an individual basis. Teamwork challenges would be relatively harder and split into different sections. Each team member will choose a certain amount of sections to do. Upon all team members' completion of their sections, the specific teamwork challenge would be completed. Everyone would be able to start their own team. Users can view the list of teams available and choose to apply for a team. The team leader (creator) can give a team-entry challenge before accepting the user into his / her team. Each person can only be in one team and each team can have a maximum of 5 members. This way, those who love teamwork can satisfy their desire in the correct platform and those who hate teamwork can just avoid it, while being happy that those who love teamwork keep teamwork off the boundaries of individual challenges!


2. The presence of a platform for people to cheat. (Forums / PMs)
We totally disagree with the removal of PMs and forums because without them, the community is no longer a community, but a site with one-way interaction between the user and the challenge.
Presenting to you a few glimpses of our AntiCheat(tm) Technology - measures that will be taken to ensure the fairness of challenges.
- Secret algorithm to check for double accounts. Double accounts will be purged shortly after creation.
- Personalized solutions to each user.
- Secret NLP-run checker for PMs and forums to ensure quality of posts.
- Personal option to enable / disable integrity checks (enable / disable cheating / explicit hinting), which will affect strictness of other standard security checks and ability to communicate with others with similar settings only, as well as ranking.
- Other undisclosed planned checks.


3. The unsatisfactory quality of challenges.
Challenges will be thoroughly vetted before uploading. Challenge creators will have to submit a full and complete writeup on the challenge and subsequently post it on the discussion-afterwards forums. Deleted challenges will be grouped in a section as well.


4. The lack of a "fun" element in the midst of the "serious" competition in challenges.
A section of the site will be dedicated to fun stuff, e.g. IRC quotes, TBS songs / poems etc. This will significantly lighten the atmosphere and induce fun and humour to the community. Once or twice a year, a small competition might be held between teams to engage them in friendly competition. Mystery prizes can be awarded to the winners.


5. Useless posts.
Users will be given an option to increase / decrease another user's forum points. When a user's forum points have decreased below a certain level, posts will be moderated before allowing them to be shown on the forums. Forum points even more below that level will result in the user being banned from posting. Forum points can be regenerated over time. Users decrease another user's forum points without proper reason will have his own points decreased.


6. The lack of development grounds.
An inspiration from rhican, we shall provide hosting and a development / bugtrack area for our users' application developments, provided they are open-source and shared among the site's users only. This way, users can share their ideas with each other on improvements to their programs as well as learn new skills while interacting with other users on a common platform.


7. Ranking.
Ranking has always been a subject of conversation. Our ranking will compromise of a secret algorithm, taking into account individual challenges, teamwork challenges, forum points and other bonus factors. Our IRC channel can then be partially linked to the site's ranking due to the fact that challenges-done is not the only factor in the ranking.



Now, we would like to hear your comments and opinions on our proposal. Any changes and modifications to the ideas above are welcomed. Please post constructively, objectively and non-flamish-ly and you will be heard. After the proposal has been finalized (if there is enough support for it), work will commence as soon as possible. We will then need a person to create a design for the site as well as challenges to be submitted.

Hope to hear from you soon

Thank you for this post with lots of good ideas.
I wonder if you talked about a hint-system too, like let the challenge creator give one or two hints for his chall.
If you read these hints it will influence your ranking / points for a solved chall,
or at least it is shown somewhere that you needed hints.

So our challenges solved are going to be reset or at least the challenges will be deleted and start all over? I need to know that before giving my opinion.

Since, I'm usually the reason why those threads are remembered as "heated", I felt obligated to read through the lengthy post.

And here are my comments/first impressions.

1. - A lot should be done in regards to team identity. force that everybody has a name, logo, ...
- a rigid maximum of 5 members, could be a hassle. When you think of starting a team, you would be at least with 2. leaving only 3 open spots, which means
being accepted in another team will be hard. Also there will be times that a few people are out doing life, and the other team members would be stuck.
a bit larger teams, say 8, and a decent possibility to leave as wel ass join. Team identity should limit the amount of "hopping", rather than to many restrictions.

2. great, except for the security through obscurity .. It won't be flawless, but it all catch a lot of people ..

3.

4. Could work, but i would think more in the direction of casual games. a "dodge" flash game with rankings ..
you know the one, where a circle has to evade squares. more interactive fun. quotes, and stuff are fine too
but i doub't that content would be significant enough to be mentioned. Perhaps even something like a TBS web2.0 integration
of a tiwtr, flickr, famousr, .. or even find somebody to blog . I believe I would experience that more as frivolous fun.

5. This will not work imho, and is lightly to frustrate more people than problems it solves. for a + - system to work, you need a vast active community. otherwise it's
pointless. I believe you should rethink this, and find another system.
Basically: - ones posts need to be moderated by admins, it will take be a rediculous amount of work, and the latency will be enormous
- it creates a rivalry between challenger, on the wrong focus points.

6.

7. I'm not so sure that i would have liked a secret ranking algorithm. IMHO ranking is very important, certainly for newcommers.
some preverse award for your efforts, but still. I would make it at least semy transparant. Or at least make the parameters
that go into your secret algorithm known. (and be bloody sure that the function is monotone).
Personally i like the idea of unlocking certain things ones a given rank is achieved.


[blank items have my support without comments ]

So overal I'm positive. I will track your progress on it. Also, you probably know that relee, chrisi, bb,... ones had the same idea
with hacking-school.org It could be a fine (their sourcecode is available)
starting point. Or you could ask what their problems were so you can prepare yourself

The main problem with hacking-school was that (including me) the people who were moderating the site and adding challenges to it simply didn't have the time to manage everything that was needed. If you can get people motivated enough to spend at least one hour a day for such a site it should work. But finding such people might. Just make sure that everybody who is on such a team works with certain standards, otherwise you might get in trouble later on, but that's purely a management issue

One hour a day shouldn't be a problem for me! At least for the time being Maybe if we can find 4 more people like me we can revive the old hacking school?
No I'm not throwing away the idea of TBS v.2. I'd say it'd be too much work to build the site from scratch. And I really appreciate the effort of relee and the others who had made a cool framework that I haven't had a chance to try Let's see if we can reuse it wisely for our purposes

Sounds like some excellent ideas - looking forwad to see how things turn out.

If you require any help - coding/challenges etc let me know

in the case you want to re-use parts of the code chrisi and I wrote, and might have issues understanding the source, please don't hesitate to ask relee@gmx.de.

Good Luck,
relee

Hello everyone, Im sure a few of you know and talk with me, I dont make much of an appearance on these forums, but if you need any assistance at all, please fell free to let me know.

Only one question... are you talking about "TBS 2" or about a "New Challenge Site" as the title of this thread says?

In the second case I would consider that using this forum to talk about its details is a disrespect to TBS owners. If you implement a site like the one proposed you can use this forum to announce it (new challenge sites are always welcome) but I don't think it's a good idea to discuss the details here and compare the features to the ones in this site... as I said, only for respect to the people who did their best to create this site.

Please, don't take this post as an attack to the idea of creating a new challenge site, it's only that I don't feel comfortable watching this "conspiracy" (notice the quotes) in these forums. Maybe just choosing a right channel (irc, public forums, distribution lists, etc) and announcing it here would be enough: "We are creating a new challenge site, if you want to help, give ideas or be part of it join us at xxxxxxxxxx".

My best wishes to your new site.
Phas