I got a promotion :) I AM a Senior Web developer now ][ Answer posted

While personally I would like to think the various programs I'm running will solve things in time [although things seems to be slowing down the past few hours], I think simply in general reducing the possibility space would help for everyone else [especially if it turns out that the game is not one I'd want to join to ensure that you get other people to possibly join:p]

With the intent that probably one should be sufficient [maybe adding more as things get really close to the deadline if there still isn't a 5th]. here are some options I can think of that don't directly reveal more of the string in order of what I feel would make things most easier at the top

• Lowering the bounds of the letters being between d/u // B/Y
  -- if you are particularly kind: guaranteed that the letters are only in the range, although maybe as a middle ground only doing it for one of them or giving such a range range for both upper and lower case letters
  -- if you want to keep things particularly difficult, just reveal a few letters that aren't in the string
• more granular ascii sums [eg: "sum of all lowercase letters" or "the sum of the the first N characters of the string"]
• lexographical based reductions: eg "number of letters that are below the letter N", only K of the following letters are in the following set of letters {A,B,C} ]

Because of the nature of the puzzle, this one is a lot more limiting than usually.. It requires a special set of skills and or programs to solve this one and I doubt the majority has them :P (myself included tehehehe)

Congratulations on your promotion and I hope whoever solves this and win shares the same passion with you for coding! I'm saying this considering your happiness and joy over it so much so that you made the most appropriate puzzle for the situation :P May the winner be equally happy for solving this puzzle as you were creating it!

I'm looking forward to some other puzzle one day closer to my set of skills (and programing and possibilities is NOT one of them :P )

I hope you get this last entry you want soon :)

I am trying to solve this only with John but it seems like the option to constraint the possibility is quite limited.
The only hint I can input to the tool is the last line, and it has already been running for 2 days+.
To late to try another tool.

I'm actually pretty happy, while I didn't succeed I did find a way to greatly reduce the amount of permutations and learned a bunch of fun tooling stuff. Unfortunately, even with all the work I benchmarked it and it was like 9 hours on my laptop per unique set of capitals and I just don't have time. But I had fun wracking my brain all this time!

yea, my code does generate this password relatively early on. I have no clue why RarFile.extractall() wasn't working or why crark didn't reach it given where it is in the permutation generation. oh well

EDIT: This is my code if anyone is curious: https://pastebin.com/GneWzrbC Determining what it was like before the more refined ascii hint is left as an exercise for the reader.