Hi admins/community,

I know I'll hit a sensitive nerve with this post but how about the deletion of the science section?
I'm suggesting this because this section is just a collection of science exercises. How hard is it to create a challenge for this section? Just pick up a random science course book, flick to the last pages of each chapter and you'll be presented with dozens of "challenges". These challenges do not have a learning curve, they do not teach/show you something new. They do not use original ideas.

What is your opinion about this?

In a second point I would also like to point out the fact of the so called 'google-info-gatherer' challenge. Some of the challenges are solvable solely by use of Google. They create heaps of aggravation because the information reachable by google is continuously growing and changing, making some of these challenge almost impossible to solve without hints/help from others. Most of them also do not teach you anything new, so what is the whole point of keeping them?

I suggest elimination of the google-info-gatherers and classify the other interesting info gathering challenges in an 'internet'-section. (Not including the flash challenges)

Greetz BaRa

Fyi, the challenges I see as google-info-gatherers are:
1: Research - Google is your friend [made by AlGo]
4: Public Transportation [made by SA007]
7: Historical years [made by zbod]
8: 95 morceaux [made by Darkego and Doula]

I aggree on the google info challenges, although good searching skills are useful too. Maybe in this challenge context a bit out of place.

The Science section heh i won't miss it.


Anyway maybe challenge deletion isn't the way to go, to fix the large amount of more or less dodgy challenges. Or the large amount in general
maybe it's time to try and start an Bright-Shadwos.net/v2 which can start out small again, and grow out to be a monster in a few years too

we could add the 2 or 3 standard challenges that every section "needs to have" like the first few crackits/jscrits to there. And then gradually
add new challenges again. All the time keeping v1 accessible to. That way you don't piss anybody off and we don't have to carry all the legacy weight around.

Whilst having a neutral stance on the deletion of science challenges, I am inclined towards the suggestion of the deletion of the Google info-gatherers. They pretty much serve no purpose except to waste time and perhaps to let users research deeper into a random topic. Those solving zbod's challenge will know what I mean. But then, most of them are pretty vague hints as to what a search term could be, making the challenge presentation irritating. I say perhaps - how many people would bother reading further just to solve this challenge when there are 101 other search terms to put into Google?

I support BaRa on this one.

I'm going to agree on the info gathering, but on the science i'm not so sure. When you look at the older members of the site, ( By older I mean they have passed all years of school and university) the section is pretty worthless. But me, being younger would actually learn quite a bit to solve some of those challenges. Now, the question should not be narrowed to just younger or older ages either. I think that we should look at the average age of each member of tbs and determine whether or not the challenge is intellectually challenging them, or just making them look into a book to review something they already know. But hey, i'm not new here, so I might have the wrong idea on this. Just something to think about though.

Well boy, I'm going to play devil's advocate here and put in my 2 cents...I like google info gathering. When you do cracking for passwords (I'm mod on a HUGE password board), you use google frequently. Very valuable tool IMO...science section, I say that can go, but I think info gathering should def. stay.

It seems that we've come to a bit of a debate here. Nobody said that google sucked. By all means google is awesome, but the google info gathering challenges really have no point. We all know how to use google, and if we don't then we should not be on this site. And the science challenges, I'm not saying that they have to stay. By all means if it's felt that they dont teach you enough, then drop 'em. But I wanna make it clear that I was not saying google is a bad tool or should not be used. I visit google no less than 25 times a day. But whether or not the google challenges should stay, that's another question.

Well, how many internet google challenges have we all solved? Hardly any, so we still have something to learn

Again, what is there to learn? Some of the answers you won't be able to get until you enter an EXACT phrase. This has nothing to do with google skills, it's just mere luck. I agree there are also some that you can find easier then the others, but in all in all, there's no great satisfaction to get from solving these challenges.

Well I'm not going to go on and on with this, it's just that personally, I feel satisfaction when I solve any challenge. If I personally had to pick between keep both science and google, (and I hate sciences), or getting rid of both, I'd clearly choose to keep both.

I suggest we re-introduce the Internet-section and remove those challenges BaRa mentioned.

Element: Everyone is welcome on tbs. Same with the non-googlers. And about the science, you might read BaRa's post carefully again. Take your physics book and you have the (science section)¹⁰⁰.

And there are some better challenge sites out there, where you can improve your physic/maths/... science. I consider tbs more as a riddle site.

Regards, theAnswer