moth/doc/philosophy.md

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Philosophy
==========
Some scattered thoughts by the architect, Neale.
Hardening
-----------
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People are going to try to break this thing.
It needs to be bulletproof.
This pretty much set the entire design:
* As much as possible is done client-side
* Participants can attack their own web browsers as much as they feel like
* Also reduces server load
* We even made a puzzle category to walk people through creating brute-force attacks!
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* Your laptop is faster than our server
* We give you the carrot of hashed answers and the hashing function
* This removes one incentive to DoS the server
* Generate static content whenever possible
* Puzzles must be statically compiled before the event even starts
* As much content as possible is generated by a maintenance loop
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* Minimize dynamic handling
* There are only three (3) dynamic handlers
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* team registration
* answer validation
* server state (open puzzles + event log)
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* You can disable team registration if you want, just remove `teamids.txt`
* I even removed token handling once I realized we replicate the user experience with the `answer` handler and some client-side JavaScript
* As much as possible is read-only
* The only read-write directory is `state`
* This plays very well with Docker, which didn't exist when we designed MOTH
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* Server code should be as tiny as possible
* Server should provide highly limited functionality
* It should be easy to remember in your head everything it does
* Server is also compiled
* Static type-checking helps assure no run-time errors
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* Server only tracks who scored how many points at what time
* This means the scoreboard program determines rankings
* Want to provide a time bonus for quick answers? I don't, but if you do, you can just modify the scoreboard to do so.
* Maybe you want to show a graph of team rankings over time: just replay the event log.
* Want to do some analysis of what puzzles take the longest to answer? It's all there.
Fairness
---------
We spend a lot of time thinking about whether new content is going to feel fair.
Or, more importantly, if there's a possibility for it to be viewed as unfair.
It's possible to run fun events that don't focus so much on fairness,
but those aren't the type of events we run.
* People generally don't mind discovering that they could improve
* People can get furious if they feel like some system is unfairly targeting them
* Every team that does the same amount of work should have the same score
* No time bonuses / decaying points
* No penalties for trying things that don't work out
* No one should ever feel like it's impossible to catch up
* Achievements ("cheevos") work well here
* Time-based awards (flags) don't mesh with this idea