A new era for Hacktoria
Welcome to our new home! For those who've never been here, you probably don't know any better than this website. In case you've been around longer, let me explain what we've built and why it exists.
2021 was a different year. Elon hadn't killed reach on Twitter yet, or killed the API by making it insanely expensive. People left their Discord notifications on. LinkedIn didn't limit the reach of pages that didn't give them money. And Google ranked Hacktoria on the first page for our main keywords.
Fast forward to 2026 and the game has changed.
Our Discord audience engagement got cut in half, after the recent age verification announcements. Google kicked us back to page 20. LinkedIn reach isn't great. And Twitter is monetized, so there's a flood of content, and conversions are way down. This means our traffic went down almost 90%.
We're basically being ghosted on the internet. Which is ironic, since I'm writing this on a platform called Ghost. Anyway...
At this point, we either start running ads. Which is expensive, especially if the service you offer is completely free. Our other option is to prevent these traffic fluctuations, by owning our audience. In marketing terms, this means you either get people on a community platform you control, or permission to send them emails, text messages and such.
That's why were here.
Ghost enables us to turn our CTF content into subscriptions. This is a platform mostly used by bloggers, newsletters and podcasts. We're just swapping the newsletter for CTF events. This means you can subscribe to Hacktoria, for free, and get notifications whenever we publish Practice Labs, CTF Events or Blog Posts. You can change the settings for these in your profile, get none, get all or get some.
What's next?
We've got a Bernstein Island CTF Event coming up, themed after Epstein Island of course.
And we're going to be adding loads of practice labs to the Hacktoria website.
As always, I'm super happy you're here. And it would really mean the world if you help spread the word about Hacktoria. Tell your friends, coworkers, or whoever might be interested in playing.