First Update
28 Jul 2020Competitive Cyber Club Updates - 07/30/2020
Hello everyone,
As you can see we have a website now! This website will be our main place to provide updates and resources to the community.
Currently, it is just a small team of us working to maintain this community and we are seeking volunteers to help build with us!
To kickoff our first blog post on our website we wanted to give some updates on projects we’ve been working on.
Feel free to read the whole blog post, or you can jump to these sections:
Table of Contents:
Competitive Cyber Clubs Custom Discord Bot
As our discord server was, and still is growing rapidly, the moderation team was looking to improve the process by which roles were created for new schools. Previously, a new user would reach out and request a new school, and then someone from the moderation team would have to go manually create that role and make it so it was allowed to be used by our old bot (carl-bot) for self-assignment. This of course was a tedious and slow process. To improve on this situation, I set about creating a custom Discord bot that would better suit our needs. This bot took about 6 months to develop with the first commit on Dec 8th, 2019 and the first production release on May 5th, 2020. The bot is currently hosted on Heroku with a staging and production app. It is roughly 1.7k lines of Python code and features a database backend as well as a premade CSV list of schools to allow it to run smoothly. I am very happy with how it turned out and I got to learn more about async and databases while creating this bot.
If you wish to check it out, the source code is available on our Github and feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions.
- @CyberJake
Logo Update
Thanks to the hard work of @lilE_gnu & @dxlphin we have updated our logo to better reflect the global community of cybersecurity members.
Survey Results
Thank you to everyone who took our survey! It is really helpful for us to make plans based on your needs. First off, the number of schools represented on this Discord is huge! We had almost 40 responses and they were from 29 different schools. So don’t be a stranger, because there are a lot of great opportunities to share ideas and resources with like-minded people from across the country and around the world.
Many of you discussed the challenges your clubs face regarding recruiting and retaining members. We hear you, and especially since this coming year will bring uncertainty and new challenges for your clubs, we want to help. That is why on either AUGUST 6th at 6:00PM OR August 8th at 6:00PM We are hosting a roundtable on recruiting members and hosting events remotely. Please check #announcements channel in the discord to vote on a day/time.
-@RizzlyBear
UPDATE:
On August 8th we hosted a roundtable with members from cybersecurity clubs across the country. At the rountable we discussed some projects we are working on and asked the community for their help.
We will also be moving forward with creating a calendar of events/workshops that various cybersecurity clubs will be making available to the community.
Competition Map and Call for Assistance
Another example of how your responses have already helped us, you told us that just one in five of you learn of competitions through online resources. For most of your clubs, news about competitions is spread through word of mouth, or there is a list of competitions that your club attends every year. We want to change that. Especially given the uncertainty what the return to campus will look like as a result of the global pandemic.
That is why we are building a comprehensive, easy to use database of every competition in the United States. We are really excited to be working on this, and we want to roll it out to the community as soon as possible. This is where we are asking for the community’s help. We are in need of a team of volunteers to help develop this platform.
If you are interested in helping us with this project, please reach out to us through the Discord or our email cyberclubsusa [at] gmail.com!