Fabian Schmalzried (Dec 05 2023 at 13:01): Fabian Schmalzried (Dec 05 2023 at 13:01):I just learned that you should not share your inputs and they should not be available on a public repo:
https://www.reddit.com/r/adventofcode/wiki/faqs/copyright/inputs
Pearce Keesling (Dec 05 2023 at 13:57):I did not know they were different. I just assumed we all had the same ones. Good call out though
Elias Mulhall (Dec 05 2023 at 14:15):That policy has always felt a little silly to me, considering it's on reddit but not explicitly spelled out on the website, and the concern seems to be you could, I don't know, collect a bunch of inputs and backwards engineer something about them?
That said I don't share my inputs, and when I use AoC puzzles as examples for other projects I cite the source and only show the example input.
Asbjørn Olling (Dec 05 2023 at 14:35):yeaaahh... I'm not doing that.
That sounds like a pointless exercise in secrets management that I don't care for at all.
Asbjørn Olling (Dec 05 2023 at 14:39):I have expects in my code that checks if it works on my actual input.
My git repo is portable. As in, you can download it and and run the code from the flake with no extra steps.
The repo is also public, so that I can share my solutions with other people (like this community).
What's the alternative?
Writing a script that takes a session cookie, and fetches all the inputs before compiling and running the code - and then requiring someone to muck about in their browser devtools to extract the cookie each time?
Or maybe implementing reddit-compatible OAuth?
Or writing my own parody inputs where all the numbers are silly, just to comply with fair use law?
Nahhh screw that.
Brendan Hansknecht (Dec 05 2023 at 15:53):Elias Mulhall said:
That policy has always felt a little silly to me, considering it's on reddit but not explicitly spelled out on the website, and the concern seems to be you could, I don't know, collect a bunch of inputs and backwards engineer something about them?
That said I don't share my inputs, and when I use AoC puzzles as examples for other projects I cite the source and only show the example input.
I mean, the next FAQ makes it clear. They are afraid someone will clone the Advent of code inputs generator. Then people will use the clone site and their yardwork (and financial gain) from the site will be lost.
I wonder if this has any real legal grounds that they could press on. Scrapping a website is legal. This feels like it generally falls into that category.
Sky Rose (Dec 06 2023 at 01:57):I save the inputs as text files that I .gitignore, which has been easy and worked well
Last updated: Jul 26 2025 at 12:14 UTC