Dear Fravia+,

                 I just read you septem.htm on your site concerning 'banning'
                 parts of your site. All in all, I somewhat agree, although for 
                 different reasons than yours.

                 Most essays on your site do not deal with anything interesting,
                 and for many newbies it is just a sign of 'having achieved something'
                 if you have an essay published on your site (it sure was for me).

                 But essays treating one single program usually won't help you worth 
                 jack.

                 Plus, there are more than enough essays on your site dealing with the 
                 same topic in slight variations. There is simply too much. 

                 As with the global information databases like the internet, your site
                 alone has become too big to effectively use, and there is too much
                 uninteresting/unimportant stuff on it. 

                 A radical weeding out is IMO a first step. (While you're at it, you
                 can already take my essay down, it is worthless to anyone who's got
                 half a brain)

                 The publishing of new essays should only happen if something 
                 significantly new is introduced, and then it is usually not necessary
                 to include huge amounts on application code etc. 

                 I do not think 'Cracking' Essays in general should be taken off-line.
                 It would be a shame to take the Advanced Section down. 
                 (BTW: Kinda sad not to find Quines essay any more...)

                 A couple of newbie-essays should be kept, too, but we really don't need 
                 any additional Keygen/Serial/Patch essays.

                 Your suggestion of moving more into 'serious' Reversing work is great, 
                 and with the cathegories of 'Advanced Cracking' and 'Papers', there is 
                 already a lot to be found on your site.

                 In fact, I don't mind if people write keygens and release them. It 
                 always was this way and always will be.
                 And writing them is not a bad learning experience.
                 Writing an essay is not a bad learning experience, either, since you
                 have to understand in order to explain.

                 But we have to be careful not to get into the same trouble as the 
                 academic circles all around the world:
                 Writing essays for the sake of having more stuff published. My essay
                 was 
                 one of those. A tool to get recognition, not something I wanted to do
                 in 
                 order to give away something I knew at that time. (Not as if there was 
                 anything useful in it)

                 Well, to quit babbling wordily: Clean out old stuff. 50% can be 
                 discarded, I guess. Only publish interesting stuff, new techniques,
                 experimental assembly, packing/unpacking related stuff, reversing
                 operating systems etc. 
                 Something on the mathematical reversal of functions would be 
                 interesting, too, although you can find about it in most calculous 
                 books...
                 Stack overflows are another thing that directly falls in "our" scope of 
                 things since in NT you do not get the source to the OS any more,
                 weeding 
                 through C in search for a strcpy wont work any more...

                 Anyways, there are plenty of things to be done, and discarding a good 
                 part of (not all of them !) the newbie essays shouldn't hurt.

                 HalVar