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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

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I did. Its not a big page. There's nothing there.

Now I'm not a (total) idiot, obviously I can debug it if i have to (and if other people are telling me "there's stuff there, you just can't see it").

If i open it in chrome with extensions turned off or a default mobile browser, stuff now appears, so yeah, its got to do with script permissions and the like.

But again, why not just include actual text in the "what is google ctf" section that answers "what is google ctf?", and/or in the beginner's section that explains what's going on, and of all the groups of people you'd build your webpage for, are security people the ones that you want a website that breaks if they block your default scripts/permissions?

If your having this much issue with figuring out what a ctf is its probably not for you. Googles ctf is pretty damn hard

If their goal was to minimize participation and competition, then they certainly succeeded. I don’t think being unfamiliar with something should ever be outright disqualifying.

If you put it that way, it wouldn't be wrong to think of it as a disqualifying round

If I were holding a competition for bakers, I wouldn't feel obligated to include a paragraph explaining what a "bake-off" is. I knew what a CTF was years before I knew enough to compete in one; it's a central part of hacker culture going back to the mid-90s.

Every puzzle here places you in a different unfamiliar situation. The only "outright disqualifying" thing is whether you can figure out something on your own. You essentially failed the first test.

They probably didn't include the text there because there are "FAQ" and "Rules" links in that page, and clicking on those lead to lots of text. They could have made the links more noticeable though.

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