Let's get critical: Feb 2015 Site Self-Evaluation

Question

We all love Reverse Engineering Stack Exchange, but there is a whole world of people out there who need answers to their questions and don't even know that this site exists. When they arrive from Google, what will their first impression be? Let's try to look at this site through the eyes of someone who's never seen it before, and see how we stack up against the rest of the 'Net.

The Site Self-Evaluation review queue is open and populated with 10 questions that were asked and answered in the last quarter. Run a few Google searches to see how easy they are to find and compare the answers we have with the information available on other sites.

Rating the questions is only a part of the puzzle, though. Do you see a pattern of questions that should have been closed but are not? Questions or answers that could use an edit? Anything that's going really well? Post an answer below to share your thoughts and discuss these questions and the site's health with your fellow users!

perror · Accepted Answer · 2015-02-23 10:04:25Z

We do not have enough questions about:
- Hardware reverse-engineering;
- Malware analysis;
- Usage of RE tools (IDA is first, which is expected but there are many others).
I don't really know how to improve participation for these topics...
We have a lot of "wanabee reverser" naive questions, but it seems to be stabilized and under control now (hopefully...). I also note that most of these beginners are absolutely not familiar with SE websites. So, the RE website is attracting new comers to the SE community (which is good ?).
The links between Reverse-engineering, Cryptology and IT Security should be more visible and accepted by the community. It will be stronger and stronger in the future anyway, so people should accept it (as an example, look at the CTB-Locker case). In terms of SE websites, it means that we should recommend to follow the three websites (or at least two out of the three) to have a better picture of the domain.
In my humble opinion, we should open the scope to software exploitation and low-level programming (assembly) to attract more people (and, anyway, the community of reverse has these skills). It doesn't mean that we should change the name or anything, just that we should take it into account before hitting the 'close' button on a question about that.

The wanna-be's are annoying, but just remember that none of us started off knowing it all, so some portion of them will proceed to learn and develop. Let's not be prejudice against newbies, so guard against that. — dyasta, Jan 27, 2017 at 9:36
I hope we will see more questions&answers about hardware reverse-engineering and malware analysis with anti-reverse techniques. — Kerim Can Kalıpcıoğlu, Feb 25, 2017 at 10:01

dyasta · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-18 21:57:04Z

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I think that newcomers are treated too harshly. If you disagree with something, by all means down-vote it, but do you really need to down-vote if it is already -9? I would vote to stop the display (though not internal count) at -1.

Anyway, people like to nit-pick and be pedantic, which is both appropriate and fun, but it really hurts morale in some cases.

Sometimes, let things slide, help, don't intimidate and run people off.

EDIT: (now in 2017) - Why have all the questions become about questions themselves, e.g. 'Can I ask this?' or 'Can I ask that'? Sad state of affairs, IMHO. We must have a more inviting community and not be so strict and pedantic.

edited May 18, 2017 at 21:57

answered Jan 25, 2017 at 20:12

dyasta

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Some of the questions about what is considered on-topic or not are prompted by concern over the large and growing graveyard of unanswerable questions asked here. An example of this are questions about reversing encryption or compression and only including a tiny sample of data
– julian Mod
May 23, 2017 at 18:09