unforum

[Ehsan]

[META] Thoughts on ARG etiquette

[krystyn]

[yanka]

I think there are two distinct categories of bruteforcing and other questionable stuff.

There are things that just so obviously shouldn't be done. Don't run a password script on thedealer's username. Don't ftp into the site if you have no idea what the login should be, and no indication whatsoever from the game that you're supposed to be anywhere near an ftp . Don't look for new characters by bruteforcing user directories. I mean, one would have to be either extremely stupid or extremely rude to do anything along the lines of the above.

On the other hand, there are things that are done during, it seems, every single game, and I'm not just talking about bruteforcing here. People do reverse DNS look-ups, and poke around the sites to find hidden directories, and decompile flash logins, etc. etc. The way I see it, PMs would have to be insane not to expect us to do all of this because, as I said, this is done for every game - and why would their game be different? Moreover, if people see archives numbered 56-99... well, they're going to look for everything between 0-55 and then some, aren't they? They see which directory the images are stored in, they're going to go to that directory.

I think most of the time all of this^ reveals little-to-none harmful information. So, this site is running on this kind of server, the flash headers are pulled from this directory, or cgi-bin is here. Here is archive #28. It is because this kind of stuff is done that the PMs are able to protect themselves. How many 403 pages do we find per game? We poke around things because we're curious, and because we've been conditioned to do that by previous games.

Sometimes people do find potentially harmful information. IMNSHO, the problem is not that they find it (see above - PMs had better expect that people will never cease to look for stuff), but that they share it. And while I think that most people realize that they shouldn't post a PM's login if they happen to find it, I understand that some information that is found is not so easily determinable as obviously damaging to the game. You figure out how the e-mails are stored in a character's inbox, and you find some e-mails that don't show up in said inbox. Are you not supposed to find it until the next update, or did the PMs count on you to figure out their system and to find these e-mails? It's hard to decide whether you've made a legitimate discovery sometimes, and I'm not sure what the PMs would prefer to be done in these cases.

However, when you find an obvious hole in the game, please don't post it. E-mail the PMs and give them a chance to fix it - they'll love you for it, and the players will respect you. I am very grateful to the people that have done just that. When you're not sure that what you found is a hole, at least please consider PMing one of the mods/admins/ops to help you make the right decision before posting your discovery and running the risk of damaging the game.

[Phaedra]

[Kjartan]

Another Ettiquite Issue We've Got

[Phaedra]

Re: Another Ettiquite Issue We've Got

[Ehsan]

Ummm what's with all this meta discussion.. Those were guidelines for all the new people who will join us soon, who happen to know nothing about an ARG. That wasn't meant for people with cobwebs around their nickname


If new people come here, they will face an overload of information and you can't say "Brute forcing is bad, but it's okay if it's within this context at this time, with these criterion, based on this assumption, if you saw that, and told whoever." That's just causes confusion. Setting simple rules for new people will help them avoid making huge mistakes (like finding a list of all in-game websites and publishing it somewhere).

Until they learn the ins and outs of the genre, you simple have to say "No brute forcing". If a puzzle requires brute forcing than I'm sure a lot of us will note that in the thread, which is a better option than having someone who just got here try and brute force every single element of the game because "it might be okay".

I agree that in reality, it's all a gray area.. but remember that it took us time to figure that out, and understand what might be acceptable or not.

It's harder for someone just joining the genre to figure it all out, so it has to be split into black or white. In which case I don't think I would change any of those guidelines.


But again, in reality, I myself scour DNS records and look for patterns in IP addresses. But I believe I can trust myself not to harm the game with anything I find, and tell the PMs about it.

The PMs do expect these thing, as yanka said. Dut PMs make mistakes, and I believe they shouldn't be punished for forgeting to lockdown something just because someone thinks the rules are "questionable" as this discussion may convey to newer people.

[colin]

It'd be nice if the PMs could say what the rule are instead of us guessing. By defining rules be limit what we do. One of the strengths of this genre has been its undefineable nature, allowing it to be flexible.

I like to think the game will make its self obvious, and that will direct us..however players always want more....and hence do thing they shouldn't

The conundrums these games face