Hello, Codeforces Community!
I’ve been actively participating in contests here, and I’m really inspired by the quality of problems and the organization of rounds. Recently, I’ve been thinking about contributing to the platform by organizing a Div. 3 or Div. 4 round with my friends.
However, I’m not entirely sure how to get started with this process. Could anyone guide me on: 1. What are the requirements for proposing a contest? 2. How to prepare problem sets that meet the standards of Codeforces? 3. Whom should I contact to initiate the process?
I believe a Div. 4 round would be a great way to encourage newcomers to competitive programming and help them build confidence.
I’d really appreciate any advice or experiences you can share regarding organizing a contest here.
Thanks in advance!
Best regards, Alibi-R-osk_er-2028
I had a similar doubt once and my college coding club also wanted to organize a Div 4 so we contacted one of the problem setter of previous div 2 round. This was his reply:
"Afaik, there's no open way to propose a Div 3 contest on CF. There is a blog by KAN explaining the problem setting process for Div 2 and Div 1 rounds (even that isn't open to all either; you need someone who has achieved a master+ rank or has been a problem setter in a past contest). Note that you can still prepare problems on Polygon, host them in mashups (and conduct an event out of it), though those rounds wouldn't be rated. You might have seen The-Forces rounds, for instance, conducted this way.
Suppose you wish to propose a Div 2 round and are short of someone with access to the problem setting page. In that case, I'd recommend you first prepare a set of good problems (not necessarily on Polygon, just the basic problem and solution idea) and approach a CF coordinator (this is assuming that the problems you prepare are good) or you could find someone trustworthy who does, and ask them to propose the contest on your behalf.
In either case, there's plenty of fun stuff you can explore on Polygon that I'd recommend you to try out. You can check out this link for reference. Polygon has quite a learning curve; you'll be able to get to cool stuff quickly if you can get used to it beforehand."
I hope this comment clears all your doubt.
Thank you so much for your detailed reply!
Unfortunately, I don’t have any masters in my circle, but we do have experts and specialists who are ready to help with problem preparation. We are planning to organize a Div. 4 round, where the hardest problem would be in the rating range of 1300–1900.
Your advice about Polygon and mashup contests sounds like a great starting point, and we’ll probably try hosting a practice contest first to get familiar with the process. In the future, once we have a good set of problems ready, we’ll try to find a way to reach out to a coordinator or someone who can propose the contest on our behalf.
Thanks again for the valuable information—it’s really helpful!
I’m glad I was able to help! One more thing: none of this is my advice; it was shared with me by the previous round’s problem setter, as I mentioned earlier. I also took his advice and explored Polygon, and it was a lot of fun to set the problems.
The goal of our coding club was to organize a coding contest for our college’s technical fest, so we decided to host it as a Div. 3 round on Codeforces. Unfortunately, we didn’t have any Masters in our circle either, so we followed the same advice and created a mashup contest for the fest. It was a lot of fun to organize and host. You can check out the contest we organized!
Can you give a nickname or his contacts please, I want to contact him to ask a couple of questions