purplesyringa's blog

By purplesyringa, history, 3 years ago, In English

Hello, Codeforces!

The current state of affairs is that running your own a contest on Codeforces is quite difficult. First, Codeforces doesn't accept single-problem proposals, so if you don't have many CP friends and can't make 6 good problems, you're out of luck. Second, many trash problems get proposed, and the coordinators have to spend much time filtering them out and then explaining why these problems were rejected. This status quo is bad for everyone, both participants and problem setters, so I'm thinking of a way to fix the situation.

Here is my idea. People generate trash problems because, when just a single of their problems is rejected, the whole contest is in danger, so problem setters 'bruteforce' problems to plug the hole. What if we help problem setters to propose just a single problem, and then problems from different people could be merged into a contest? This would reduce the fraction of bad problems because setters won't propose them just to fill holes.

The question is about bypassing the bus factor—coordinators. I think there are many 2300+/red users who could help moderate problem proposals. There are many people from Div 1 who like competitive programming but write Codeforces rounds not very often, perhaps because of Codeforces style or timing. I think such people would be ideal moderators: they have experience, they won't cheat, they are ready to help and they're interested in looking 'behind the scenes'.

As a bonus, testers who would like to test rounds but they don't have friends—problem setters, will be able to take part in the process. And these testers aren't necessarily high-rated participants — it's quite common that neither contest authors, nor testers see a simple problem solution based on, say, greedy algorithms, or the tests are too weak, and this is only noticed by experts during the round.

In TL;DR form, the idea is to help testers, moderators and problem setters find each other to reduce the burden on Codeforces coordinators and run quality rounds more often.

What do you think?

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