Codeforces during COVID-19

Revision en1, by ChaosAngel, 2020-03-24 16:32:48

Hey guys!

I hope you and all your families are well and safe during this outbreak. May the sick be healed and the well stay well.

It is apparent that many of us now have significantly more free time on our hands, at least temporarily, and this is evidenced by the spike in participation to an astonishing 20,000 yesterday. Personally, I am spending more and more time on this website solving problems, and I'm sure many of you are too!

This is why I think it would be an excellent idea if we ramp up activities on this website, and create more fun community things to keep us busy with. (I'm not talking about only more contests, we can be creative in our activities).

I'm a relative newcomer to the site, so I don't know how exactly this could happen, but I certainly have some ideas:

1) The most obvious thing would be to increase the frequency of rated contests immediately, to accommodate for the spike in demand (as of now there are more people registered for the div 3 in two days than several earlier rounds have had total).

2) We can also have unrated, and perhaps even themed contests, which don't have to be as rigorously coordinated. orz to zscoder valentine contest for a beautiful example of that idea in practice.

3) Longer Team based contests (ACM style) , or even day-long long solving marathons.

4) This one's a crazy one that I'm just including it to expand horizons, but a concerted effort to target, by a large number of skilled people (Reds, I'm looking at you) an unsolved CS algorithm?

I would love to hear your ideas; you guys probably have experience with what can and cannot be done as a coding community. I will edit to include the more upvoted ideas, to make them more visible.

We should stay home. Yes, but we should also stay sane.

Cheers
ChaosAngel

Tags covid-19, #community, #contests

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en1 English ChaosAngel 2020-03-24 16:32:48 1864 Initial revision (published)