Idea to improve missions

[mShred]

Just throwin in some opinionated comments.
I feel like the way we propose the missions kinda pushes people to go look for answers. The forums have too many spoilers from the beginning to end of each thread. The answers are out on the interwebz and we leave them blind. Natural noob response would be to try to find those spoilers in the Forums or one Google. Some people may honestly learn better after having seen the answer. But then others just want to get points. Things like this "My profile, rank = Master" make people want to have the most points. Uh, okay? Nice to know your rank is Master.. Too bad it doesn't mean shit. It'd be nice if we had a way of pushing them toward legitimately figuring it out rather than gathering points.
Yes, I got that quote from your signature hellow533.

[hellow533]

Just throwin in some opinionated comments.
I feel like the way we propose the missions kinda pushes people to go look for answers. The forums have too many spoilers from the beginning to end of each thread. The answers are out on the interwebz and we leave them blind. Natural noob response would be to try to find those spoilers in the Forums or one Google. Some people may honestly learn better after having seen the answer. But then others just want to get points. Things like this "My profile, rank = Master" make people want to have the most points. Uh, okay? Nice to know your rank is Master.. Too bad it doesn't mean shit. It'd be nice if we had a way of pushing them toward legitimately figuring it out rather than gathering points.
Yes, I got that quote from your signature hellow533.

I've had that forever, but look into what I said before, an educational challenge section with explanations and tutorials, along side with editor tools related to the mission would help greatly. I would love to see missions that explain how to do things, and help you do them. Once completed I want people to say "I learned something from this mission". I have never learned anything off of a HTS missions because I need information BEFORE I attempted it so I could actually complete it. Just see what can be done, because we are not only helping people practice but also trying to teach "newbies" how to do this from the beginning.

I'll give you an example. Say I just made an educational mission called SQL injection. If you know the injection great move on, but if you don't there should be a tutorial *this is an educational mission mind you* on what SQL injection is. It will then tell you what different commands do and help you move on to the next mission. This would also be great with educational programming. I just think if we have a place for people to learn, it would help them along greatly instead of missions that make people use google to find their answers. This just leads to people finding tutorials and skipping through or using Youtube. You shouldn't need that to do a mission, there should be helpful laid out explanations outside of articles. It's own mission section for education.

And yes, I did love the fact I got points. That's what pushed me to learn, but for the majority I have noticed they don't even understand the missions they did, they just racked up points.

And I do love to learn, but I did like to points system as well. Most signatures don't mean shit anyways. It was HTS and HBH that pushed me to learn, but originally only so I could complete more missions because I felt like I was actually learning about realistic uses. I wasn't. However I did go through school to get my CompTIA Net+ and Security+. They didn't just say "Here's the test go use another source to find out what to do and how to do it, learning on your own." No, they taught me how to do everything, what layers of networking there are etc. etc. Please, I think even the community will raise with education rather than a "here's the mission go do it" attitude.

[anarchy420x]

I agree with hellow533 to a degree; I think what he proposes goes a little to far though. Here is an example of why our current missions needs to be redefined. The first mission "The Idiot Test" has listed requirements: HTML. Absolutely no knowledge of HTML is required to finish that mission. The knowledge needed is intermediate browser knowledge to know how to find the HTML code. If we changed the requirements to "Intermediate browser knowledge and how to find the html code" then they would actually know what they needed to do and not ask for help. They would still learn how to do what you are suggesting they learn from that mission. If we want to teach people that have little knowledge of technology about technology, then you have to ask yourself one question. How would I teach my mother, father or a computer illiterate. Yes, pushing them to learn is great; no, throwing them in the desert with a bottle of water and a knife will not efficiently bring in more HTS users and teach. You might get the few that are willing to survive and stick it out, but I'm sure we'd all love to have more users.

[Monica]

The idea to improve HTS missions has been thrown around for quite awhile now, and I agree that many of the missions need improvement. To keep this short - when I was a staff, we did put a lot of the community's ideas into consideration. I don't have much of a say as of now and don't know what the current staff is bringing to the table, but I'm pretty sure you can expect many things to improve gradually. Some of you guys in the community need to have more realistic expectations though. One of my ideas that I shared was to make small modifications in the missions and make some missions dynamic to ensure that nobody has the same solution.

In the meantime, do not expect super-brand-new missions FROM the staff as this would take PLENTY of their time that they are putting in to contribute to the community as it is . You can, however, expect improvements. Also, keep in mind that if you have a mission you're willing to contribute to HTS, feel free to submit it ANY TIME, and it would be appreciated.

[anarchy420x]

The idea to improve HTS missions has been thrown around for quite awhile now, and I agree that many of the missions need improvement. To keep this short - when I was a staff, we did put a lot of the community's ideas into consideration. I don't have much of a say as of now and don't know what the current staff is bringing to the table, but I'm pretty sure you can expect many things to improve gradually. Some of you guys in the community need to have more realistic expectations though. One of my ideas that I shared was to make small modifications in the missions and make some missions dynamic to ensure that nobody has the same solution.

In the meantime, do not expect super-brand-new missions FROM the staff as this would take PLENTY of their time that they are putting in to contribute to the community as it is . You can, however, expect improvements. Also, keep in mind that if you have a mission you're willing to contribute to HTS, feel free to submit it ANY TIME, and it would be appreciated.

That raises a good point. If you have something to contribute whether it be an idea on how to improve/change the missions, or the community, expand on it. Bring it into detail and submit it to the HTS staff. The only thing it can do is help create more idea's and save staff time by having to do everything on their own. The whole premise of the site is for the community to contribute, not just a few people do all the work and thinking.

Can we get detailed information on submitting new idea's put in this thread for those that have been reading? Also, if you have something to submit, put work into it. Don't just throw them an idea without any content to it; do the work, see results. If you want to see phreaking missions, give them more than I want to see phreaking missions. Either submit an entire mission, or if you cannot do that, research and submit as many detailed idea's about missions as you can. Give them something to work with.

[LoGiCaL__]

One of my ideas that I shared was to make small modifications in the missions and make some missions dynamic to ensure that nobody has the same solution.

I like this idea but I find that it would be hard to implement. For instance, if the mission required a password and the password was then made to be dynamic/unique to the session that you are currently in, that's all fine and dandy but the fact remains that you would still obtain it in the same manner. So, the user wouldn't be able to look up the password but could just look up the way to get it. At least they are going through the steps though. Personally I think the best way is to just give an explanation of what the exploit is and why it can be used in the given situation. This way whether the user wants to work from the top down or from the bottom up they still end up learning something and then reinforce it with some hands-on work.

Let's take for example when you are learning something new like a new programming language. You read about the concept that you are about to use then you see proof of concept in code. You can then write the code out and see how it works or you can tweak it and change it to how you see fit. Other people may find it more useful to look at the code (say they already are familiar with programming ) and if they don't understand the syntax then they may choose to read about it to get a clearer description.

So many times you read about an exploit and in theory it seems simple but when it actually comes to putting it into action then it's like, "wtf, where should I even start". It would be cool to see a wiki on exploits and then just a place to give it a go ahead. I also understand that this would be no easy task by any stretch of the imagination.

[mShred]

I agree with Monica. The fact is, our devs won't put the time into it. It'd be nice, however. Which raises the point of user contribution. Check out limdis's thread for that here. Great idea's are great, but it reaches the problem of what will realistically happen.

[hellow533]

I agree with Monica. The fact is, our devs won't put the time into it. It'd be nice, however. Which raises the point of user contribution. Check out limdis's thread for that here. Great idea's are great, but it reaches the problem of what will realistically happen.

I've already started on educational based missions. Is there a place I can turn those in? It is summer after all so I have plenty of time on my hands. Maybe I could get with the development team on it, and if everybody agrees with the idea start creating tons of educational mission-style tutorials. Ones with built in tools and such.

Think of missions that don't reward points that give a full explanation and tutorial on how to do it. Like PHP programming (or any other) for example. It would tell you commands, and have a development tools to let you execute commands. Same with ones based off realistic. How to read and program/edit HTML, or make a database in SQL, etc. Just give it a chance I'm sure you'll be pleased.

[mShred]

I've already started on educational based missions. Is there a place I can turn those in? It is summer after all so I have plenty of time on my hands. Maybe I could get with the development team on it, and if everybody agrees with the idea start creating tons of educational mission-style tutorials. Ones with built in tools and such.

Think of missions that don't reward points that give a full explanation and tutorial on how to do it. Like PHP programming (or any other) for example. It would tell you commands, and have a development tools to let you execute commands. Same with ones based off realistic. How to read and program/edit HTML, or make a database in SQL, etc. Just give it a chance I'm sure you'll be pleased.

If you wanna talk to the devs, jump on IRC. Look for bren2010, or one of us mods.