Somehow it turns out that for me, each coming the New Year means more and more. This is an excellent opportunity to take stock, to breathe fresh air and to go through a kind of catharsis. This is a rare opportunity to be with the family, dress up in Santa Claus and just have fun.

Holidays give me a clear criterion that I do the right things. If during the holidays, I begin to think about it, to recall some deferred ideas, eager to implement something new. So I’m doing right things. My things. And now exactly the same as in several recent years: during New Year holidays I write code for Codeforces, trying new technology or simply I’m making minor changes in testlib. It is necessary to me: at this moment are no deadlines, do not press the obligation. Just now, at 3 am, I can not break away from being able to do something new. I would like to take a moment and realize that spun in my head the whole year.

I'm insanely happy to huge number (9144!) of registrations on Good Bye 2016. Your desire to grow, to learn new things, solve problems and invent, improve skills and compete, all this things give me strength and desire to develop the platform.

I wish you not to lose the fire in eyes, when you meet an interesting problem. I wish to continue to find pleasure in each contest or round. I wish to find, to solve more and more complicated and interesting problems. Victories and achievements! Wish you to solve all things which you didn’t solve in 2016!

Happy New Year!

But you, please read this post entirely. It is important to me. It draws the symbolic line to me and the whole Codeforces team. And, of course, below it is written about change handles gift and a colorful masquerade of ranks. Go!

Magic Gifts and Where to Find Them

Change handle feature

Hurry! Only until the 10th of January, you can change your handle (but only once)! Note that it will be possible to roll back the changes or change the handle again only after a year. Be careful what you wish for.

You can change your handle to the new one which wasn't used before by anybody or which was used by you before. The links to a profile page with old handle would automatically redirect to the actual profile.

This year we have an improvement. If you took part in at least 10 rounds you can request handle of an inactive participant. It means that the participant should have a period of activity on Codeforces of at most 30 days, this period should be in 2012 or earlier. The inactive participant can’t have posted comments, messages and so on. It can’t take part in more than 2 contests. It will be automatically renamed and informed by email. If you can’t change handle to others, it means that some requirement doesn’t meet. Please do not ask me to do something with it. I’m not Santa Claus.

Talking about handles I always reminisce the following story. Once a user wrote me the message: "Please change my handle from I_love_Valya to I_love_Sveta, as I no longer love Valya ..."

New Year's masquerade of colors and ranks

Traditional magical tab has appeared in the profile setting. Happy New Year!

Partners, customers and sponsored events

We are always pleased when companies pay attention to the programming contest whether in order to find the brightest talent (yes, you are!) candidates, whether it is to support our community and just show themselves to you. Very pleased that this year the list of our partners long and varied. Many come again, and it’s inspiring. Here is a list of companies with whom or for whom we hosted competitions: VK, Mail.Ru, CROC, AIM Tech, 8VC, Wunder Fund, VeeRoute, Intel, Diagram, MyTona. In this list, I did not consider the company to whom we just hosted a mirror of their main event (hello, Microsoft).

Here is a list of sponsorship and championship rounds:

• Championship VK Cup 2016 (together with VK)
• Championship CROC 2016 (together with КРОК)
• Mini-championship 8VC Venture Cup 2016 (together with 8VC)
• Sponsored round Wunder Fund Round 2016 (together with Wunder Fund)
• Sponsored rounds AIM Tech Round 2 and 3 (together with AIM Tech)
• Experimental marathon round (together with VeeRoute)
• Championship Technocup 2016 (together with Mail.Ru, MIPT and Bauman MSTU)
• Mini-championship Intel Code Challenge (together with Intel)
• Sponsored round Canada Cup 2016 (together with Diagram)
• Russian AI Cup 2016 (separate from the Codeforces platform, together with Mail.Ru)

Progress

The development does not stand still. Me, SladeThe, kuviman, fcspartakm design features, write code, debug, do profiling, read logs, test. In short, we have a fun live. The system load become higher, large number of improvements have been made in the backend of the system, this changes are not explicitly visible to you. I reviewed the list of commits and made a selection on the progress in 2016 (probably lost something):

It is me during the New Year holidays

• add contests entirely from Polygon, instead of problem-by-problem (for admins)
• fixed possibility to register on a contest twice
• migrated to Ace as a code editor on the submit form
• in Contest Wizard (for Gym) supported problems with answers not produced by solutions, use checkbox “Incompatible answer format”
• fixed authentication using VK
• multiple performance improvements
• better protection against bots and spam
• spoilers in blogs and comments
• save drafts into localStorage
• extended API with methods: user.friends, user.blogEntries, blogEntry.view, blogEntry.comments and other
• improved support of marathon problems
• joint view of questions in rounds for divisions (for managers)
• website mobile view
• improved support of user lists
• extended registration to the rounds
• fixes in the rating system
• Codeforces::News (in Russian)
• Polygon experienced the Black Day, reconfigured backups and replication system
• feature to filter hack by problems
• better form to choose t-shirt
• comments preview during edit process
• instructions how to write delivery address
• show tutorials directly from Polygon (in blog posts)
• fixed possibility to submit a solution twice
• better syntax highlighting
• feature to register again on a virtual contest
• taps instead of double click in the mobile view
• multiple files/solutions upload in Polygon
• many improvements in the Polygon API

Statistics

I reluctantly started to collect statistics and to prepare pictures. According to past experience, it is laborious and tedious. But it was not there! I liked it!

This year, statistics surprised me! Every year I prepare myself mentally to the fact that we are close to reaching all the interested audience, that in the next year we will not have time to do as many as done in the previous year. But just look at this beauty!

Growth of registrations. We are close to 0.5 million registered users!

Counted only participated in rated events in period July-December. Beautifully grow!

Submitted solutions: you become more and more active! Keep up the good work!

Blog posts with positive score, having at least +5 votes, having at least +20 votes, having at least +100 votes. The total number of posts is not interesting, because a lot of trash/spam, which immediately disappears and the result much depends on how we protect against bots and inadequate.

All positive scored comments, having at least +5 votes, having at least +20 votes. The growth is small, but it exists.

India, Bangladesh, South Korea became strongly in 2016!

Pageviews, about +25% in 2016!

Visits, more than +20% in 2016!

Visitors, more than +20% in 2016!