Today I saw a thread where users were discussing that we can have these type of contests more frequently than once a year. I too share this opinion, and I have an idea for this.
Let Codeforces have two different ratings (like TopCoder has Algorithm and Marathon ratings separately).
- The first (already existing Algorithm rating) will be for regular contests. This will be the "actual" rating, and CF already has this.
- The second one (we can call it Fool's Gold or some funny name :D) will be for contests like the April Fools contest, which can be held probably once in a month! Ideally it could be 1st of every month, but the exact schedule can be decided by admins.
I agree that organizing this type of contests monthly will be time-consuming for the setters, so maybe we can have fewer problems (less than the 9 we had in this month's contest), ideally about 4-5 problems per contest. Naturally, this would mean reducing the contest duration from 120 minutes to about 90 minutes.
Please comment below if u have any suggestions.
I think it's great. If such contests will be added to CF, there will be a fun-contest in 1st January. :)
Then probably Good Bye 20xx will be a fun round......
Personally I don't like this idea. Maybe 3 or 4 such contests in a year will be acceptable, but one in a month will be in my opinion too much. It will be approximately 1/4 of contests which CF organizes. Main goal of Codeofrces should be to held real algorithmical contests and if I were Mike I wouldn't like to hear that "Codeforces is this site which organizes algorithmical and prank contests". As I said before, 3 or 4 such contests per a year won't hurt but don't let them to be a significant part of Codeforces events.
i understand what ur saying. i have no intention to bring any disrepute to Codeforces, and if my original post seemed so then i apologize.
coming back to the point, once every month was only a suggestion (the exact frequency of these contests can be decided by the admins). all i meant was that it would be better if the frequency is more than once a year, because this month's contest was fun for a lot of participants. so even 3-4 contests in a year will be better. :)
EDIT: maybe it will help to have a poll among participants to decide the exact frequency of these "prank" contests!
To begin, I don't like the idea of the rating for the "prank" contests. Let them be unrated, fun diversions of our usual programming lives (even if that means more programming).
Otherwise it sounds interesting. Not necessarily prank contests, simply unusual contests. (Output-only contest, anyone? Like Project Euler, or to some extent Google Code Jam, Facebook Hacker Cup, and IPSC. This one might be able to be rated.) But there's a vital component: are there authors that are interested on making those kinds of fun contests?
Well, that's an interesting topic. Let me, the author of the only three April Fools Day contests known to me, throw in some thoughts.
First, let's have a look at the participation level (= the level of interest in this type of contest). The most participants April Fools contest ever had was just under 1500 in 2013 (I'm not counting people who solved no problems, there's no good way to count them). To put this in perspective, round #240 had around 1700 participants in Div2 + 700 in Div1. Keep in mind that this is a once-per-year event vs typical weekly recurring event. If April Fools contests become recurring as well, the novelty will wear off, reasons like "this is not a perfect time for me, I'll just wait for the next contest" will gain more power, and participation will degrade to three-digits numbers in no time at all. It is very hard to increase popularity of certain type of contests if they do not have prizes or rating, and adding them takes admin effort.
Two years ago I wrote a post about possible ways to promote Unknown/Surprise Language Rounds (which are somewhat close to the April Fools contests in not being serious). None of them was used. I'm not even sure whether t-shirts from SLR #6 have been sent out :-)
Now, we have plenty of "we can have more (something)" or "we should have more (something)" topics here at Codeforces spawning every month — better and faster editorials and spam protection are two regulars :-) For some reason we never have "I can give you more (something)" topics appearing! The bottleneck of any such things is not the enthusiasm of the community, no — it's the willingness of problem setters to create a contest.
SLRs were designed by the admins as a series from the beginning (as opposed to April Fools contests which were 100% my idea and were a one-off event originally). To date we had 8 SLRs, the last 5 of them written by me, and their frequency decreases. I'd love to participate in one, but I haven't seen a contest by someone else in years :-)
I started gathering, inventing and polishing ideas for this year's April Fools contest in the end of January — that's more than two months beforehand. It took the best part of two weeks before the contest to finalize the ideas drafted earlier and to implement them — and I had help. Some ideas were rejected for their similarity to ones used earlier, some were postponed till the next time due to lack of time. The admins had to tweak Codeforces system for two of the problems (Fortran and A+B ones — by the way, thanks, guys!). Doing it every month feels absolutely unrealistic to me, especially if we want to keep the quality and the variety of the problems high.
Bottom line: You can suggest to have a poll among participants to define the frequency of joke contests, but it's the problem setters who you have to talk to about how frequently they are willing to run such contests!