ctftime
Feature request: "Looking for team/players"
A lot of CTF players come to CTFTime.org looking for events. Some of them are also looking for teams. And sometimes the newly formed teams are looking for players.
CTFTime.org would be a good place to put an "open position/looking for position" system that would allow:
- players to post information that they are looking for a team
- teams to post information that they are looking for players
This might help accelerate the scene's growth.
Have you checked https://ctftime.org/dating/ ? May be it needs more documentation.
Hmm, is it linked anywhere? It's the first time I see it.
Also, what's a "tag"?
There is a link in faq. Tag is a "tag", something like "web", "reversing" etc - there should be suggest.
The page itself could certainly use a bit more explanation. Right now when I go there it's empty. Maybe only because I'm on a team already and there are no players looking to get picked up, but even just a short explanation at the top would be useful.
I'm happy to help provide some text for it -- it's not entirely clear to me though how the process works. Anyone who isn't on a team has the option to enter tags describing their interests? And anybody looking for a player can filter on those tags?
You can filter people who marked "Looking for a team" and set skills in theis profiles.
Ok, I see now, I played with it a bit, made issue #14 (which ironically has a typo itself in the title) to update the profile text, and then here's some suggested text for the /dating/ page:
---starttext---- Enter skills or tags to find CTF players interested in joining a new team. When players select 'Looking for a team' in their profile setting, they will appear here if you search for a skill they've entered. If you've entered your information there and no one has contacted you, you might be interested in the OpenToAll CTF team formed on reddit. ---endttext----
I think the biggest problem is that people might not have ideas of what to search for. I think some suggested tags (or even showing all tags in the database and letting people select them) would make a big difference. It would also be nice to list a total count on that page of the number of people looking for teams.
Once those changes are in place, I think promoting it via reddit/twitter/etc would be good to encourage more people to use it and be aware of it.
Thank you! Done. There is a tag suggestion when you start typing. Like "web" or "crypto" (may be we should add it to the text).
Excellent, looks better. I still think it would be helpful to show all tags people have put in the database, but that's a good start.
Also, minor nitpick, but I think they'd look better in separate p tags, or just one big paragraph with no breaks instead of the br tags in between. Not a huge deal though, just a very minor suggestion.
I changed the behaviour - now only tags which can lead to some players suggested.
I like it. Yeah, I think that interface is perfect. Be too much if the entire list were always shown. Very nice. @gynvael how's the new interface strike you? More clear how it works? I definitely think it's an improvement.
So to bump up this thread - I've hired a small firm do patch up a site I had in mind - it's in Polish on purpose, since I don't want to collide with ctftime.org's dating system (rather than that, I wanted to fill an opening on the Polish CTF scene). http://ctfteam.pl
I think doing a similar interface on CTFTime.org would be a little more user-friendly.
Nice! I like the idea marking team as "interested in new players". What the "Web/Crypto/etc" numbers mean?