Please help me, the old-school uncles are everywhere

╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ ║
║ PLEASE HELP. THE OLD-SCHOOL UNCLES ARE ║
║ EVERYWHERE. ║
║ ║
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝


Hello everyone,

I have remained silent about this for a long time, but the evidence has become impossible to ignore.

For years, I believed wargames were simply websites where people solved challenges, submitted flags, collected points, and occasionally complained about broken PHP.

I was wrong.


┌──────────────────────────────────┐
│ There is a much larger network │
│ behind all of this. │
└──────────────────────────────────┘


The old-school uncles are everywhere.


At first, I thought it was a coincidence. I would open a challenge from 2007 and find an uncle in the comments. I would search for a hint and discover a forum post by someone whose registration date belonged in a museum. I would follow a broken link through three archives and somehow end up on another uncle’s website.


Different countries.

Different communities.

The same recurring signs:


Old PHP.
Strange Perl.
Forgotten forums.
Quiet IRC channels.

And uncles.


I began investigating.



━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
01 / THE FIRST SIGNS
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━


Modern platforms usually tell you what you are looking at. There are categories, tags, difficulty ratings, and sometimes even hints.

An old-school uncle gives you a page with one input box.

Above it, a message:


good luck


You spend six hours reading the source and another six examining HTTP headers. Nothing makes sense.

Eventually, you discover that the intended solution involves a browser bug from 2004, mentioned exactly once on a German mailing list.

You ask the author whether this was intentional.


yes


The answer explains the challenge.

The smiley face raises further questions.



╭────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
│ 02 / THEY CONTROL THE MEANING OF "EASY" │
╰────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯


Old-school uncles appear to use a difficulty scale that is incompatible with the one used by the rest of humanity.

When a normal person says “easy,” they mean:


You should be able to solve this
without too much trouble.


When an uncle says “easy,” they mean:


I solved this in 2009 after three days,
so you should be able to solve it
in twenty minutes.


The three days are no longer part of the calculation. Neither are the two years of background knowledge, the custom tool they wrote, or the conversation they had with the author on IRC.


Only the twenty minutes remain.


This pattern appears across Germany, the Netherlands, Vietnam, France, and probably everywhere else.

I suspect there is an international standard for uncle difficulty ratings.

Unfortunately,


[ the documentation is a dead link. ]



───[ 03 / THEIR RELATIONSHIP WITH TIME IS SUSPICIOUS ]───────


Normal people disconnect.

Old-school uncles do not.


You enter an IRC channel.

Nobody speaks.

Ten minutes pass, then an hour.

Just as you are about to leave, someone writes:


hi


You reply immediately.

Nine hours later, they answer as though the conversation had never paused.

There is no apology for the delay, because apparently there has been no delay. You are simply participating in a conversation whose timescale you do not yet understand.

Some of these people seem to have been idling in the same channel since before Discord existed. They may have changed computers, jobs, or countries during that time.


Their nickname has not moved.


Whatever timezone they live in, my operating system does not support it.



╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ 04 / THE NETWORK HAS NO HEADQUARTERS ║
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝


I do not believe the uncles are organized in any conventional sense.

There is no central server, no headquarters, and probably no shared calendar.


That would be too normal.


Instead, the network seems to operate through forum signatures, shoutboxes, PHP comments, forgotten Git repositories, and links labeled “friends” on websites nobody has redesigned in eighteen years.


broken link
↓
archive
↓
nickname
↓
repository
↓
unknown wargame
↓
registration page


The registration page still works.


Somewhere, an uncle notices you
in the access logs.


People often assume these corners of the internet are empty because they are quiet. Sometimes they are. But sometimes a challenge is still running, someone is still paying the hosting bill, and its author is still around.

You just have to ask your question and allow approximately one IRC conversation for a response.



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05 / I MAY HAVE MISUNDERSTOOD
THE PROGRESSION SYSTEM
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━


This is where the investigation became personal.

I have spent years wandering through different wargames. I thought I was collecting points.

But gradually, something changed.

At first, I only cared about solving challenges. Then I started recognizing the people who wrote them. I became curious about the history of the platforms. I began talking to operators and spending more time in communities.

Eventually, I started thinking about building something myself.

I now suspect the real progression system is:


Player
↓
Contributor
↓
Builder
↓
Operator
↓
UNCLE


Nobody explains this when you register.

There is no warning when you create your account. No confirmation dialog appears the first time you think,


“It would be a shame if this disappeared.”


One day, you are learning SQL injection. The next, you are explaining a challenge that vanished twelve years ago to someone who has never heard of the platform.

Then you catch yourself saying:


back in my day...


I thought WeChall was tracking my scores.

It may actually have been documenting my transformation.



╭────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
│ 06 / A FIELD GUIDE FOR NEW ENCOUNTERS │
╰────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯


If you encounter an old-school uncle, remain calm.


[!] Do not ask their exact age.

[!] Do not immediately question
the website’s design.

[!] Above all, do not open the conversation
by suggesting that the entire platform
should be rewritten in a framework
released last Tuesday.


Listen first.


They may give you the clue you needed, the history you did not know you were missing, or a completely unrelated story about a server that caught fire.

It is impossible to know in advance.

This is part of the experience.


When an uncle says a challenge is “easy,”

clear your evening.


When they say “just think,”

leave tomorrow flexible.


If they send you a smiley face, do not panic.


It may be encouragement.

It may also be the entire hint.



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07 / WHY WE SHOULD CHERISH THEM
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Behind all these jokes is something I genuinely appreciate.


These people built much of the maze
we still explore.


They wrote challenges for no money.

They answered questions from strangers.

They fixed things that almost nobody noticed were broken.

They kept communities alive long after the initial excitement had passed.


A ranking can tell you who solved a challenge.

It rarely tells you who spent a weekend repairing the server so that anyone could solve it at all.


Not every platform survived.

Domains expired.

Forums disappeared.

Source code was lost.


But the people often remained, carrying the things that were never properly documented:

why a challenge was written,

where an idea came from,

who helped build a platform,

and what it felt like to be there.


Then they passed some of that knowledge to new players.

Those players built new things.


That is why I am writing this—not to expose some secret uncle conspiracy, but to appreciate the people behind it.


┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Preserving that history does not require every │
│ old server to run forever. │
│ │
│ Sometimes it means saving the source, writing │
│ down a story, crediting an author, or thanking │
│ someone while they are still around to hear it. │
└────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘


We should not wait for a farewell announcement to say that a place mattered.



╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ 08 / ONE DAY, IT WILL BE US ║
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝


Today’s player
↓
tomorrow’s uncle.


The people we now think of as old-school were once newcomers too.

They got stuck.

They asked for hints.

They stayed awake far too late trying to understand something that would look obvious the next morning.

They probably broke a few things along the way.


And then, somehow,


twenty years passed.


One day, younger players will discover our old posts.

They will laugh at our tools and wonder why we used such primitive AI models.

The infrastructure we currently consider modern will look ancient.

We will try to explain that things were different then.

They will politely pretend to listen.


And when they get stuck on one of our challenges, we will find ourselves typing:


this challenge is easy


The cycle will be complete.



──────── KEEP THE MAZE ALIVE ────────


So explore the forgotten wargames.

Read the old forum threads.

Remember the people who built the places where you learned.


And when your turn comes, leave something behind:

a challenge,

a write-up,

some source code,

or a patient answer
to someone who is stuck.


The servers may disappear.

The rankings may change.

The technologies certainly will.


But something of those old mazes survives whenever a former player builds a new one—and leaves the door open for the next curious stranger.



╔══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ ║
║ CHERISH OUR OLD-SCHOOL UNCLES. ║
║ ║
║ AND WHEN YOUR TURN COMES, BE A GOOD ONE. ║
║ ║
╚══════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝


— rayaseiren

Current status:

slowly becoming an uncle

Precious writing, upcoming uncle😆

Once upon a time, in a place not so far away, there was a little penguin.

He was unlike other penguins. He really liked computers. He wandered through strange corners of the Internet, solved challenges, broke things, fixed some of them, stayed awake far too late, and occasionally wondered why anyone would spend six hours solving something that had been designed by someone who apparently had too much free time.

He met other strange penguins, just like him. They built wargames, opened IRC channels, wrote strange code, discussed binaries, argued about solutions, and left pieces of knowledge behind. Nobody called them old-school. There was no old school yet. It was simply the present.

Then the years quietly passed by.

The penguin kept wandering. Websites changed, tools changed, people changed, and many of the places he remembered slowly disappeared. Some challenges became archaeology. Some names became stories. Yet somehow, he was still wandering through the maze, still learning, still getting lost, and still finding his way back.

Then one day, someone called him "uncle".

He laughed at first. Surely there had been some mistake. He was still the same person, who got stuck on challenges, followed wrong paths, and learned new things every day.

But perhaps becoming an uncle was never about age. Perhaps it happened when you stopped merely exploring the maze and started remembering where its old paths went.

When someone asked about something from twenty years ago and you could actually answer. When you began caring not only about solving the next challenge, but about what would remain after legacies are gone.

So perhaps he did become an uncle somewhere along the way, without noticing.

And that makes him wonder about the next twenty years. One day, the "uncles" will become "granpas". The young wanderers of today will become "uncles" - the ones explaining how the Internet used to work, how the old challenges were solved, and why anyone thought those ancient tools were clever. By then, many servers, rankings, repositories and platforms may be gone too.

Unless the uncles leave something behind.

Not necessarily a server that runs forever. Sometimes it is source code, a write-up, a challenge, an archive, a story, or simply an answer to someone who is stuck.

The important thing is to keep the knowledge moving. A community survives not because its infrastructure lasts forever, but because each generation leaves enough behind for the next one to continue the journey.

So if you are an uncle now, perhaps there is one responsibility that comes with the title:

"Keep the door open"

Let the next wanderer in.

And perhaps, twenty years from now, some young stranger will find the path we left behind, smile at how primitive everything looks, and wonder about the old granpas who were once foolish enough to spend their nights solving puzzles on the Internet.

And perhaps that is how the maze stays: the old paths fade, but someone is always there to leave the door open for the next wanderer.

THE KIDS ARE COMING

Never touched an IRC Channel - please use discord, or stay silent.

You're challenge is too hard? Too bad, there are already several writeups online, I just copy paste the solutions. Time and attention is precious, if you put no effort into explaining your challenge, I will not spent time solving it.

Don't tell me about your great achievements, the sites will be gone, your ranking obsolete, you will be forgotten. Like our parents telling us about the hardships of their childhood. Exaggerations.

And still.

I spent 1 week transcribing an audio file to recovern an image. Almost went insane.

I asked questions on the forum, or some of the uncles, even on discord, Many answered. I traded flags.

I'm building my own site now, using express.js, of course, who uses PHP for greenfield projects nowadays!?!?

And somehow, my page is on WeChall.

Somehow, people message me, asking for hints.

Some would even call me .... un "uncle"!?!?

But no!!!! I'm still a kid!! I'm allowed to be arrogant, It's my right to know it better! We need to change things!

What about queerness? Painfully missing from many websites. (but how many uncles are queer? closeted? sometimes, I can feel .. some connection)

What about beginner-friendliness? Exciting the next generation (and yet, the most common complain is that my challenges a too hard)

We need ART! Hacking should embrace creativity more! (and still, have I matched the creative spirit of hacker.org even now, after so many years?)

anyways, screw the uncles and grandpas.

THE KIDS ARE COMING

Doh...

I suppose this thread wasn't meant to offense anyone.

All "veteran" challengers (let's call them like this) are really open minded people. At least I think so. And also crazy people x)

If you really want creativity go solve BaRa's challenges on TBS

These challs are just a game at the end, not a size ball / brain / ego / whatever competition

Take care.

It's an honest take from the perspective of a rebellious youth - an conflict as old as time, a ritual of growing up. Are *you* offended by it? Because I'm certainly not offended by anything .. I'm just a "kid" knowing everything better. I wrote the post in cooperation with rayaseiren, so we are on good terms here.

It's satire at its core, still: where do you see that I'm offended? If you read carefully, I'm expressing deep respect for the veterans. And yet: I embrace my rebellious nature.

Anna was clearly being satirical, and I think S0410N3 was simply saying that the thread probably wasn’t meant to offend anyone either.
So in the end, I think you’re both making valid points and are actually saying much the same thing.

Dear seniors, please accept my deepest bow. We love and respect our veterans.

TBS produced a lot of great players back in the day. I'm really enjoying playing the revived version now that the original service on WeChall is gone, and I hope more players from the newer generation get a chance to experience it too.

HTW is a much newer platform, but some of its challenges still have that nostalgic Hacker.org feeling. I think it’s definitely worth checking out as well.

P.S. This post is also a little homage to an old WeChall forum thread: “Please help me with this.” Some traditions deserve to be kept alive.
https://www.wechall.net/forum-t798/please_help_me_with_this.html

The original version is not gone

http://bright-shadows.net/index2.php

So today I learned i'm an uncle, a veteran, and a senior...
Thanks rayaseiren to remind me what it was like 30 years ago, when I was just a young adult discovering the world of hacking sites, impressed by the seasoned players, overwelmed by the difficulty of the challenges, with the feeling that I would never be able to reach a decent level, let alone reach the top 100 !
The kid is still alive inside me, and his curiosity and enthousiasm prevents me to retire. I guess I will continue to hack forever, with the same love for old-school challenges and for new modern ones!

When I first entered the Top 10, I was competing with you and tenflo. At one point I was pushed back out of the Top 10, and I honestly wondered whether I could ever reach #1.
But competing with players like you made me stronger. When I fell to #11, sisyang, the Korean #2 player at the time, climbed to #12 and waited for me. He encouraged me to keep going higher and told me that I could do it.
That support, and the competition with all of you, is part of the reason I am where I am today.
Thank you, Xaav. If my post brought back even a little of what you felt 30 years ago, then it was worth writing.
I hope that kid inside you never disappears. It is an honor to share the same maze with you.