The EG staff and a lot of members on the mentor lists get PMed quite often with the same mistakes that users are making. So before sending out a PM for help or before posting your problem in the forums, please read through this and see if your problem is listed here.

These are a lot of common mistakes/problems people have when doing the EG missions:

1. Copying and Pasting:
If you do not copy and paste right you will not get what you expect even though you have the correct information. Those damn little trailing or leading whitespaces can be the cause of a lot of problems. Watch them!

2. Referrer Checks:
A lot of the missions on EG have referrer checks. This is to deter cheating and make sure you do the entire mission and not just the end because somebody gave you the answer. If you believe you have the right information and the mission is not working for you then check your referrer. Most people use a spoofing program like RefControl. Make sure there are no referrers in there. Also, we have noticed some AV programs like Norton will sometimes block referrers from being sent. Try to disable your AV and try again.

3. Reading from File:
In the programming missions or any other program where you read from a file be sure to include the trim( ) function to get rid of unnecessary whitespace. Without trim your code may not work at all or give inaccurate results. Trim is a PHP function so use the equivalent if you are coding in other languages.

4. Cookies:
When doing the programming missions or scripting any code that hits EG you will need 2 cookies. They are your PHPSESSID and enigmaV4 cookies, which are used for authentication, so we know who to give mission completion points to.

5. Mission Simulation:
Not all missions are going to work how they do in the wild, for example SQL injections. Some of these are simulated and some are real live databases. If they are simulated don't expect all your queries to work. They are hard coded to only except certain input. If they are live don't expect all queries to work either as many have been filtered to only allow accepted input.

6. Mission Mentors:
EG does not provide one to one personal mentoring! The staff simply does not have the time for this. We do provide one to one specific mentoring on a single mission basis. Check each mission's mentor link to find a mentor who has volunteered. Only PM members who are on the mentor list. If they are not DO NOT PM them! Also, mentoring is only to be used when you have exhausted all other possibilities to solving the mission. Do not PM more than one person on the mentor list! You are wasting everyone's time by doing this. Just wait a day or two and if that person has not responded then try somebody else. Also, when PMing a mentor include the mission title in the subject line. You should also include in your PM what your problem is and what you have already tried to resolve the problem. Stating you need help with such and such mission is not helpful to a mentor. Please be specific.

7. Mission Passwords:
Many of the missions have passwords that you need to find. Once found a lot of the time they are encrypted or hashed. It is your job to recognize this and do what is necessary to get the password back to plain text. For example submitting a hashed password is not the same as submitting a plain text password.

These are just a few of the ones I can think of. I'm sure more will be added in time so please check back if you are having issues.

If you have any more that you think need to be added please PM me.

Thanks

EG Staff