try harder

People are free to share or not. As I think that sharing knowledge is better than ‘try harder’, I decided to help more newbies and sharing people. This is why I’m thinking of creating a tchat on that purpose. If you need such a tchat, just tell me.

Please don’t create a chat with the intent to discuss active machines freely.

‘elite’ people already do it on reddit and on the slack and there is no place for script kiddies questions

elite people on reddit?

TLDR; Indirect hints in private are fine, but to mirror ippsecs response - please do not create a chat dedicated to spoiling machines. That invalidates the purpose of HTB. While you may learn how to do something via a spoiler, you won’t learn how to research the subject touched on in the spoiler - the mechanisms behind it, the tech, the teachings.

I’m just going to chip in here - the point of HTB is to help people learn. While giving hints in private is fine, anything that goes beyond a hint (e.g. a direct hint towards a vulnerability, an endpoint, anything past methodology or asking questions to get the participant to ask the correct questions themselves) would be considered spoiling, and goes against our Terms and Conditions.

Please, feel free to keep helping people, but ensure you only give indirect hints - get the participant to come to the correct answer (or sometimes, the correct question!) themselves. It’s a hard balancing act, and some times you have to just say no, as some machines cannot easily be hinted to without spoiling entirely.

Learning takes time, and dedication. The motto “Try Harder” is appropriate, as it really forces the participant to look at the problem, absorb what is going on, try things they may not’ve tried, search for knowledge they may not have even known they needed.

I agree as it stays fun and doesn’t kill motivation, I dont think that everyone has consciousness that they hurt with try harder.

totally g0blin :+1:

I’m in as far as helping is concerned.Newbie’s like me could learn so much.

There are plenty of places to learn, in fact there are several writeups for many machines at https://www.vulnhub.com/ and a bunch for retired machines here. The argument ‘but people learn in different ways’ doesn’t even slightly hold up when there are so many options for learning out there.

http://www.abatchy.com/2017/03/how-to-prepare-for-pwkoscp-noob
https://forum.hackthebox.eu/categories/writeups

Writeups for other boxes are how I learnt and now I’ve got the basics down, I love that there’s no fallback on these ones. Removing the safety net was a big part of my development and if you remove it for yourself and for others you’re just doing yourself a disservice.

As an example, I recently attempted a box with AV. I spent a good 5 hours researching different ways to bypass antivirus and obfuscate my code. The irony was that, there was a much easier way in and I was just overthinking it massively, but I wouldn’t want to go back and get an easy answer. I learnt an absolute tonne in that process of failing. Whilst we may need a nudge from time to time it shouldn’t be our first resort.

A dedicated chat for spoilers just defeats the entire spirit of competition and the purpose of this site. If you want to learn then go do some vulnhubs, overthewire, rootme etc. Even the slack is a place for script kiddies questions! Just ask on a topic. I’m effectively a script kiddie and I ask for help there when I’m stuck, I just try and use the example set by How (not) to ask a technical question - YouTube.

You disinform, i never said that I will design a chat to spoil freely, I just wanted to help newbies because they are ignored and sometimes laughed on the slack. Now I close the topic, there wont be a chat for script kiddies and newbies. Sorry for them, elite deciced. With respect. And thanks for silent people who shew me their support in backstages.