Linking Dead Sites

Time to revive this topic again: Dead site scoring.

WeChall has been an incredible hub for the community, and I've been really enjoying the grind on the active platforms.

It is a real pity to see a great site go down and never come back. But it's a part of life that we all have to accept.

Since there are more and more dead sites, I think it's time for some real changes to the scoring system.

I completely agree that veterans shouldn't lose credit for the massive effort they put into solving those challenges. However, keeping those legacy points in the main global pool creates an unavoidable statistical advantage for older players.
Furthermore, hoarding points from inactive platforms doesn't necessarily reflect a player's current skill level.

To bridge the gap between honoring historical achievements and keeping the ladder mathematically competitive, here are a couple of potential solutions:

- Active vs Legacy Leaderboards: split the global rankings into two distinct boards. An "All-Time Hall of Fame" that includes every site (dead or alive) to honor the veterans, and an "Active Ladder" that strictly calculates rankpoints based only on currently reachable sites.

- Archived Site Categories: move the points from dead sites out of the main rankpoint calculation and convert them into a separate "Legacy Score" or unique badges visible on user profiles. This preserves the history without warping the math for the current generation of players.

- Point Decay: points from dead site could gradually decay over time once the site goes down, until they reach a set minimum value or cap.

Making a tweak like this would make things fairer to new players, and help promoting new talents within the community.

Regards,

quangntenemy

I think some kind of "feat of strength" for dead sites is also a good idea.

Or removing scores completely and just showing the % of each site. But that would destroy the idea of WeChall I guess.

why not have a toggle button in the overview? to choose between : only active, only dead, or both...

What's even the point of comparing global WeChall scores, beyond getting a general sense of how active someone is in this type of thing?

Some people only like a certain type of challenges and not others, meaning some really skilled/knowledgeable individuals might have way lower global score than others just because they lack as much "breadth" in terms of topics covered.
Besides, you can also just do easier challenges on a wide range of sites but never complete one.
You may end up ahead of someone with the same "breadth" as you but more skilled/knowledgeable than you who focuses on a smaller number of sites and takes their time to tackle all challenges, including the really hard ones needed to get to 100% on those sites.
What should be rewarded more, breadth or depth?

So while I do agree there is some correlation between skill/knowledge and high global scores (especially the really high ones), it's generally not a good metric for comparing yourself against others.
Comparison on a site-by-site basis is what really matters from a competitive standpoint.

I do agree that some kind of filtering in the leaderboards of all/only live/only dead sites would be a "nice to have".

As for point decay, I am against it because I think it will create unnecessary FOMO.
If you want more "time pressure", play a CTF, other sites already have leaderboards for that.
WeChall scoring currently already breaks ties by date, which is a good way to encourage people to solve challenges sooner rather than later, without creating the stress of losing points if you don't.

Personally I wish there was some sort of preservation project for these kinds of sites, like what's happening with TBS.
Smaller gestures and efforts also count, for example at some point before I managed to solve Electrica, its domain expired so I e-mailed Caesum and soon after it was back up.
IMO it's better to keep the scoring around optimistically, because you never know when a site might be fixed/revived so you might end up deeply regretting the deletion of those scoring records.
Plus keeping the scores for dead sites functions as a historical record of your progress/journey, which is valuable in itself.

One shouldn't take the scoring too serious.
The score, indeed, only tells a bit how much time you invested + how successful you were.
Maybe score / time_spent is a nice metric.
But computing or approximation of time spent is quite impossible.

It is about sharing the net with others. teach and learn. discover and laugh. get known to each other.
It would be great if our goal would be spreading peace and knowledge and work towards it.
Knowledge is one of the things that increase when it's shared.