ae27ff

Hello, I'm working on a series of challenges for beginner and intermediate users, aimed at testing some basic skills of ARG players. It would be great to have this listed here, and after looking through the Join documentation I have worked on providing the basic APIs and documentation you require.

Note: The first 12 or so levels are intended to be easy/beginner level challenges. After that, more intermediate, abstract, or combination puzzles come into play. There are currently 29 levels to reach, but my existing solvers always keep me busy making more.

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Documentation:

Challenge Site Name: ae27ff
Challenge site: http://mirror.otp22.com/chal

Validate script : http://mirror.otp22.com/chal/wechall/validatemail.php?username=%USERNAME%&email=%EMAIL%

Userscore script: http://mirror.otp22.com/chal/wechall/userscore.php?username=%USERNAME%

Site Icon: http://mirror.otp22.com/chal/wechall/32x32.transparent.gif

Site description: A growing challenge site that includes a variety of beginner and intermediate puzzles intended to hone user information-finding and decoding skills used in Alternate Reality Games.
Shorter version: Beginner to intermediate puzzles intended to hone user hunting and decoding skills used in Alternate Reality Games.


Discussion is held on irc://chat.freenode.net/#ae27ff

Categories: Web basics, Crypto, Steg, Observation
Site birthday: April 1st, 2015 (no, really)
COO: United States
Other: On-site registration and Cookies are required to access puzzles. otp22.com is the parent site and I can prove administractive access if necessary, but otp22 itself is not associated with these puzzles. Brute-forcing and hacking are forbidden.


Profile pages: http://mirror.otp22.com/chal/profile.php?username=%USERNAME%
Personal profile information is not supported at this time. When logged in, this is the user's account settings page. Emails are not made public, but can be set AFTER registration.

Nothing in section 6a is supported at this time.

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Test-cases:
http://mirror.otp22.com/chal/wechall/validatemail.php?username=crashdemons&email=crashenator%40gmail.com
1
http://mirror.otp22.com/chal/wechall/userscore.php?username=crashdemons
>1 (may not be the highest number due to administrative testing)
http://mirror.otp22.com/chal/profile.php?username=crashdemons

EDIT: changed my email, profile URLs, bleah typos

Forgot to mention this- to add your email to your account on ae27ff:
* register
* click your username at the top, which will take you to your profile
* enter your current password as a form of verification (leave New Password blank)
* enter your desired email address (ae27ff does not use this information except for wechall)
* click Update profile

Some notes:

The "sl overlay" seems to be a bit annoying and on older browsers it makes the site unusable.

Once you click "User Ranking" or someone's profile, there is no link back to the challenge.

It would be nice to have a way to recover your password when you forget it. Probably requires making the e-mail part of registration.

It's a bit weird that the name of the site is not visible anywhere (except in the IRC channel name).

You have 'username.php?' in the profile URLs in your first post.

Other than that it seems to be a nice site.

I've taken some time to consider your comments and I've improved some things because of it:
* I've edited my post above for the correct profile URLs (that's what I get for typing so early in the morning)
* The site name is now in the title of all pages and on the login page
* The page name on your profile (by clicking your username) is now a link
* There is now a Continue link at the top beside Logout that takes you back to the challenge
* The scanline effect (sl overlay) can now be toggled from your profile
* Visiting http://mirror.otp22.com/chal/lofi will override the scanline with or without being logged in (Low-end portal)
* Either of the above two options should now hide the "sl overlay" element entirely by making it display:none.

My comments:
Browsers must at least support HTML5 otherwise - there are many styles I'm using that would require CSS hacks on older browsers, and it's time to stop the free lunch frankly.

You can get your level password at any time by clicking on your name at the top, by visiting the start page, or by logging in - or using the Continue link now

Passwords are stored as hashes for security reasons, so "recovering" a password can't happen - but I might be able to see if I can work out an email-based password reset, though I'll need to discuss this with the domain owner first.

The site name did need a little more visibility, it was kind of a random/last-minute decision.

Thanks for quick changes.

While I agree that there is a limit to which you can be expected to support old software, reality is that there is still no full HTML5 support in many browsers (current or not). Besides that, you are also using features that are not part of HTML5 (or CSS3).

Good to hear the passwords are not stored as plain text. ;) Not sure why I wrote ' recover'.

Two more things: the colour of visited links seems too dark and I would personally also like to be able to disable the "sound" in the profile.

Thanks again and keep up the good work!

Categories seem to include 'Observation' and '???' neither of which I've seen before.... oh wait... ;)

This site is ok so far, quite nice - reminds me more of zestriddle and notpr0n rather than a usual challenge site

Congrats on the site crashdemons