Wargames, crackmes and CTFs - how to deal with spoilers?

Question

Since this site is public now, I guess we shall start to see questions related to solving challenges on some wargame, solving a crackme and so on... As someone how has learned a great deal by doing such challenges myself, I can appreciate the value of doing the actual research and discovery process myself, and wouldn't have liked it if i could just read the solution somewhere. My concern is that many challenges could be spoiled by directly answered questions here.

Now, I'm not talking about straight "How do I solve this crackme" type of questions, I guess those are right out. I'm talking about questions that are not obviously related to some challenge, but you know them to be if you've solved/seen it before.

Would you find this an issue at all ? How would you deal with these?

Answer 1

I think the type of person who googles the answer, finds it and goes through it step by step is either very new and feels that he's being helped by the walk through or simply not the type of person who will be a good reverse engineer. If he's not curious and driven enough to discover the answer to his questions himself he'll not go very far in this field. I'd say hiding it in a spoiler tag is probably the furthest we'd have to go just to avoid unintentional spoilers.

Answer 2

One of my answers was a solution to a wargame level. I'm not going to name the wargame, but I'm sure a few people know of it.

I don't think this is a serious issue:

• The knowledge is important, and the problem is often seen in the wild — it's a general question that makes a fairly good contribution to the community.
• The tool already existed — It's not like I'm sharing a specific solution to a specific wargame.
• The wargame name isn't mentioned, so people can't search for it significantly more easily than they could before. (Which is why I'm not naming the wargame here, either).

Of course, if the above conditions didn't hold it would be a different question. I think the litmus test should be as simple as: "Is this a valuable contribution to the community?"

I also think we should respect wargame creators' wishes to a certain extent – if the terms of the wargame state that solutions, questions, binaries or code should not be made public, that should be considered. I'm not sure if there's a practical way to implement that sort of thing, however.

Answer 3

suggestion

just use

the spoiler marker: >!

for

each separate items

and

---

enough separators

so that

not everything is revealed at once.

conclusion

This should do the trick!