It just seems like theres a fair bit of potential for hacker.org to be more, cleaned up forums could be a start. There must be a fair bit of traffic on here from google and I'd be surprised if that traffic has a good rate of people joining and benefiting from the challenges or the forums, judging by how these forums are hardly bustling. I guess a lot of the people who do stumble through here are looking for information which hacker.org itself isn't really geared up towards and they probably aren't going to be aware that the site offers challenges as most people will come in from links to the forums and it's posts, as the forums and challenges are very disconnected for browsing. A unified navigation scheme i.e. a navigation bar on all pages to take you to the forums, challenges & games. Admittedly this would probably be quite a large undertaking to get it consistent across the site as the current varying page layouts don't lend themselves to a simple solution such as a floating quick-link bar on every page.
The traffic could result in more revenue generated by the advertisements which is at least one incentive for the managers, which should be enough to sustain a high quality dedicated server which could be put to use by running more
BitBath and
Wormageddon games, offer shell account rewards, have RootThisBox style challenges, host IRC or whatever else, with plenty of surplus money.
There's loads of potential for hacker.org, aside from the previously mentioned possibilities that could come from dedicated hosting, there could be other things such as articles like I said in the last post, user profiles maybe showing skill sets and more detailed challenge information and maybe a blurb which could be useful for things like project collaboration like
sourceforge, could have simple code sharing too like
Coder Profile.
Articles get in vast quantities of visitors as
www.osix.net experiences with over 100,000 hits on the articles a month but unfortunately they haven't done much with it and it is a collection of stagnating articles with quite a drastic range in quality and a fairly poor article system which makes browsing though the site for relevant articles a load of effort which detracts from the quality of the site which I think is why they have a hard time getting new articles; I'm an editor on there and they are lucky to get 2 article submissions a month and most of them are little more than 2 lines of rubbish (as anyone can submit an article for consideration) that don't end up published. I think the reason for the lack of new articles on OSI is that the community doesn't attract particularly skilled individuals, all it has to attract them is 13 general and 11 reverse engineering challenges which you have to trudge through sequentially, most of the people are beginners who come by looking for a calculator made in VB6.
Given the community that exists on hacker.org I think an article system could flourish with new articles on the wide range of things that the users here are knowledgeable in.
It would require a lot of work and a major redesign to do any of these but I think it would be very much worth the work for the improved uptake of visitors on here, who would get to do the challenges if they stumbled into the forms and there was a global navigation thing going on and I think that the members of this community must have some brilliant knowledge to share with articles/tutorials which everyone could benefit from. An example of a similar existing site/community is
hackthissite which has forums, IRC, articles/tutorials and a variety of challenges.
Aiming high FTW
I wouldn't mind doing this myself as I used to have a phpBB2 forum a few years ago that coincidentally even had the same main skin (acid tech green, just to add to my endless trivia) and like to pretend I'm fair and reasonable which is something else that can be handy for a mod (sells self to the powers that be).
