Memory Editing Section Call For Input

[Jaerin]

I've not read many threads where people are asking for hand-outs, many have fairly complete code and are just confused where to go next. Actually most of the time it's just a matter of confusion with offsets. This notion that every person is asking for hand-outs on a programming message forum is absurd. And this dutiful, righteous attitude of having to 'restore order' on these boards with sometimes horrific responses makes it even more outlandish. It seems many here have lost or forgotten the curious, playful spirit that lead you guys here in the first place. Now it's "I have knowledge you want, therefore I will act as I please!"

This person above admits to not having any knowledge of ASM and reversing. Worked feverishly for months using this very search function to figure things out and finally able to create (I'd imagine) good working code. Yet this poster ends his post with 'if you want to learn ASM and reversing this section isn't for you.' Really? I see it's not for me but it was certainly for you? I am willing to bet many of the sections you've read were filled with posters getting chewed out for asking 'dumb questions'. Questions in which you benefited greatly from. (I do apologize for quoting you Xelper, you are probably a nice guy/girl and I don't mean you have or are in any way shape or form a negative person. Just trying to point out issues with communication here.)

I know many of you worked your tails off to understand what you do, came such a long way and are really great at this memory reading stuff. I just hope there could be more transparency and/or guidance into this process.

The thing that I don't understand is all the people who have come here to say they've made the journey says the same thing. It takes a lot of work, it takes a lot of searching, it takes a lot working by yourself with no real help from anyone, but gosh darn it when you make it then you'll be one of us and can post here.

Why not take the lessons you've learned, the pitfalls you fell into, and the process you went through and make it available to those that come after you so they don't HAVE to slog through and find the answers to their questions on their own. Its not so black and white to be able to say that everyone who comes here that has nothing to contribute is asking for handouts. That's totally not true. More often than not they are looking for inspiration, guidance, and mentoring and yet they are usually met with arrogance, sarcasm, and ridicule.

[Bananenbrot]

The thing that I don't understand is all the people who have come here to say they've made the journey says the same thing. It takes a lot of work, it takes a lot of searching, it takes a lot working by yourself with no real help from anyone, but gosh darn it when you make it then you'll be one of us and can post here.

Why not take the lessons you've learned, the pitfalls you fell into, and the process you went through and make it available to those that come after you so they don't HAVE to slog through and find the answers to their questions on their own. Its not so black and white to be able to say that everyone who comes here that has nothing to contribute is asking for handouts. That's totally not true. More often than not they are looking for inspiration, guidance, and mentoring and yet they are usually met with arrogance, sarcasm, and ridicule.

Yet there are people, who aren't able to do the same thing (use search, brain, connect dots, etc.), who screw it up for every other beginner in this section. I really don't mind helping people, who are disciplined, ambitious, critical thinking and most notably don't overrate their knowledge (for the love of god, give me some english skills). E.g.: based on the (intellectual level / number of posts) rate i would love helping harrycarry with his specific problems.
One thing I notice, is that most good and helpful stuff in this forum gets lost in those (more or less stupid) help requests, source code releases and rubbish posts. There should definitely be something like a community wiki à la StackOverflow or a simple wiki page for memory editing, where anyone asking a question in this forum is redirected to. After all, a forum is about problems and their solutions worked out together in a discussion.
A sub/sibling forum would be awesome though to push off those more beginner level questions.

[-Ryuk-]

I'd like to see another sub forum like the "Elite memory editing" one which you have to be accepted to view. Anyone can apply but must donate some useful code, of course any code in this section shouldn't be used in public projects without the consent of the owner.

I'd be more than happy to post a lot of my code in a section that keeps the leechers out where we can all share stuff.

This wouldn't replace the elite memory editing section as this would have the top secrete code in it ^^

[PyGuy]

A number of people have suggested higher/lower levels to the forums to help with the junk that gets posted. I'm a little concerned with how people would be invited to post in the 'elite' section. Who defines elite? If it has to be moderators, that's a lot of work and they could get bombarded with idiots ("y u no nvit me?").

If limited access is going to be used for the non-noob forum, I'd like to see some kind of voting system similar to rep (or maybe even tied to it) where once you get enough votes from providing helpful information outside the 'elite' forum, you get the ability to post there. People that don't know even how to ask for help properly can get down-voted and kept out. That would help it to be self-policing and less work (after the initial implementation) on the admins/mods. In theory, this should also lead to some better posts in the non-elite section as people try to get votes, but I suppose it could wind up with a lot of re-posts of 'helpful' stuff.

[Jaerin]

Doesn't seem like a good idea to segregate an already dwindling community.

Seems to me that people just aren't accepting the fact that there is no talent here anymore and what talent there is here has no interest in being active drivers of activity. That's the whole point of where this discussion started. People talk about leechers, moochers, idiots, whatever, but to be honest those are your fans. Its a little like having a teen idol pop star complaining about how immature his audience is, he wouldn't exist without them so you can't exactly throw stones.

Those that can are doing it right now and not sharing. Those that can't are somewhere else or being called leechers and whiners. Change that paradigm and something might change around here.

[Apoc]

Alright, so, on the topic of "elite" memory editing. We made that section a long time ago for people who were doing *very* advanced things with WoW. (At the time, this included working knowledge of Warden, packet structures, etc. Not just playing with object managers and Lua) These people also possess very high skills in RE'ing, as well as programming as a whole. (All of us are fluent in at least 3-4 languages, as well as able to understand the ever-growing list of acronyms in low-level computers. Plus, we all have proved we know what we're doing, so its a place for us to get "down and dirty" with advanced things, and some private stuff we can trust eachother with)

As for cleaning up this section, I think a Wiki will prove to be the best course of action. Being able to just link people to a page when they ask how to walk the object manager for the umpteenth time, is better than 3-4 pages of name-calling and nonsense.

This forum is to discuss reverse engineering WoW specifically. Not learning how to program, learning ASM, or learning how to reverse engineer at all. This section assumes you already possess enough knowledge to dive in and figure things out given the information posted. I can't tell you how many times we get people coming here with absolutely zero programming knowledge, or any in-depth knowledge of computers at all, wanting to write a hack. It just plain doesn't work that way. There have been many (more than I care to count) threads where actual working source code has been posted, and the person asking shrugs it off because they don't understand it. That's where most of the hostility comes from in this section.

[Cypher]

Doesn't seem like a good idea to segregate an already dwindling community.

Seems to me that people just aren't accepting the fact that there is no talent here anymore and what talent there is here has no interest in being active drivers of activity. That's the whole point of where this discussion started. People talk about leechers, moochers, idiots, whatever, but to be honest those are your fans. Its a little like having a teen idol pop star complaining about how immature his audience is, he wouldn't exist without them so you can't exactly throw stones.

Those that can are doing it right now and not sharing. Those that can't are somewhere else or being called leechers and whiners. Change that paradigm and something might change around here.

You seem to be overlooking an important point, which is that this section was NOT founded for newbies. This section was created so developers who met a certain standard of knowledge/understanding could discuss WoW hacking topics without having to be inundated with the aforementioned newbies.

The hostility is not because you are a newbie, the hostility is because you ignored the big flashing neon sign on this forum that states that it's an advanced forum and you don't belong here.

That's not to say that won't change (which is exactly why I created this thread -- to find out what the best course of action for the future is), but you can't really complain about the newbies having stones thrown at them, because they shouldn't have put themselves in the firing line to begin with.

[Jaerin]

I don't give a rats ass if I offend you or not.

You guys are acting like a bunch of elitist asshats. Plain and simple. I call it how I see it...

If you want to make new friends and attract new talent to this section stop pissing all over the people who have something to contribute by being interested in your work to begin with. If you were doing it only for personal gratification you wouldn't need to come here at all. If you do come here, you would post your question, get your answer and leave like everyone else does. Not my problem the moderators refuse to clean up the forums of newb questions or when they do there is nothing left in the forums...why? Because no one wants to be here and get pissed on.

Maybe its that big fat neon sign that's preventing anyone from even bothering to come here. You asked for my feedback and I gave. You just continue to prove my point by being offended by the fact that I'm giving you some honesty.

[Robske]

When a user requests an invite to the Elite Memory Editing Section, a small discussion is had in one of the invite threads. When we believe you can be trusted with its sensitive contents (after all, there's code in there that can bend the very fabric of time and space) and have the required knowledge you'll most likely get in. Truth be said, this is a very subjective matter and if you're not well-known on this board you simply won't get in.

As for the direction of this board: there seems to be alot of discussion on the goals of this section, as Apoc and Cypher pointed out: we're not here to teach, but to discuss. We can help out as long as the question is on topic and hasn't been answered before. But perhaps we've reached the point where everything has already been done and because the aforementioned discussion of WoW is no longer taking place, we should move to a more educative take on WOW reversing. Finding someone to lead the sheep and write the guides won't be easy though.

[streppel]

Already said that it would be great if I could help writing explanations in a wiki and things like this

[Bananenbrot]

I don't give a rats ass if I offend you or not.

You guys are acting like a bunch of elitist asshats. Plain and simple. I call it how I see it...

If you want to make new friends and attract new talent to this section stop pissing all over the people who have something to contribute by being interested in your work to begin with. If you were doing it only for personal gratification you wouldn't need to come here at all. If you do come here, you would post your question, get your answer and leave like everyone else does. Not my problem the moderators refuse to clean up the forums of newb questions or when they do there is nothing left in the forums...why? Because no one wants to be here and get pissed on.

Maybe its that big fat neon sign that's preventing anyone from even bothering to come here. You asked for my feedback and I gave. You just continue to prove my point by being offended by the fact that I'm giving you some honesty.

When I first stumbled over this section, I could program about one month. I read through every post I came over, while still improving my programming skills with reading books and practicing and stuff. Like many people do, I picked out a WoW bot as an untangible aim to have an actual task while learning to program.
What I did not was posting questions for the problems I came over because they were a) already answered and I found my answers after some (sometimes 2h) searching or b) debugging and finding errors myself was mostly faster than asking a question here. Plus, I did not want to embarras myself like all those other newbs did when posting obvious and simple to answer questions.
Of course I was naive to believe that I could have a running bot after half a year when never having programmed before, but I never thought that any of those 'Elite guys' are pissing everyone all over. Of course, with knowledge comes vanity to some degree (read early posts here or on GD) , but you may not forget that those people pulled up this whole section with their (still ongoing!) contributions.

That were my 2 cents for those sometimes harsh, but invaluable elites.
Now a question to you: Do you code? Have you ever seen code that is only a duplication of what has already been posted, but in a worse, verbous and often wrong version, so that your eyes are about to bleed?
It's a feeling similar to reading a bad book or report, which buries its main statements in irrelevant spaghetti facts. They hide the main intent and make it hard to filter out the really good contributions. This amplifies the "gtfo this section noob" effect even further. IMO, rhis section should not end up like a giant trash bin.

EDIT: Actually, that's the point in Wiki's... approved users can edit to keep the entries orthogonal, clean and the facts right...

[Cypher]

I don't give a rats ass if I offend you or not.

You guys are acting like a bunch of elitist asshats. Plain and simple. I call it how I see it...

If you want to make new friends and attract new talent to this section stop pissing all over the people who have something to contribute by being interested in your work to begin with. If you were doing it only for personal gratification you wouldn't need to come here at all. If you do come here, you would post your question, get your answer and leave like everyone else does. Not my problem the moderators refuse to clean up the forums of newb questions or when they do there is nothing left in the forums...why? Because no one wants to be here and get pissed on.

Maybe its that big fat neon sign that's preventing anyone from even bothering to come here. You asked for my feedback and I gave. You just continue to prove my point by being offended by the fact that I'm giving you some honesty.

Awfully hostile for someone whinging about hostility...

This thread was created for people like YOU to voice your opinion and try to steer the direction of this section into what you want it to be. But whatever, if you would rather have a bitch than actually have a civil discussion on improving the section that's fine, you'll just be ignored.

Anywho...

Thank you to the rest of you for providing input without being rude. I'm seeing a lot of talk about a wiki, but I worry about who here has both the time and the knowledge to get it started and then 'moderate' it (expand content, fix incorrect content, take care of misbehaving users and vandalism, etc)... Do we have any volunteers?

[Apoc]

Thank you to the rest of you for providing input without being rude. I'm seeing a lot of talk about a wiki, but I worry about who here has both the time and the knowledge to get it started and then 'moderate' it (expand content, fix incorrect content, take care of misbehaving users and vandalism, etc)... Do we have any volunteers?

I nominate Nesox.

[jjaa]

I think (as others have stated) most of us just are not doing WoW related stuff anymore, or if we are only a little bit here and there. Personally, when i see a post that i can answer, i just generaly don't. Why? Because you can see from the post that the person will have no clue how to use the information that you will give them unless you spoon feed them offsets ect. Which is impractical for two main reasons. They wont lean anything and i can't be ****ed updating my WoW client to take a look. Don't get me wrong, not all post are like this. But, questions that are silly/naive just don't inspire a useful response.

A wiki sounds like a good idea. However, didn't we try do that before? and no one used it...If we decide to go to a wiki we must try promote it more. For example moving the info dumps to the wiki and having a sticky about it. The other information on the wiki should be kept as independent as possible from the version, to make it last. Also allow some form of automatic publishing so that we could write a script to automatically update a wiki of warden offset or something. A lot could be done with a wiki if some people were prepared to put some effort in. But, i doubt that a lot of us who don't even reverse WoW anymore will bother keeping it up to date.

[-Ryuk-]

If we do go for a wiki, id be more than happy to update the warden scans(like on the old one before it got removed)