MikeMirzayanov's blog

Good news...and not so good news
By MikeMirzayanov, 13 years ago, translation, In English

Hi everybody!

Okay, we've got good news and bad news. What do I start with? Okay, let's start with the bad news to finish more optimistically.

As I was removing the results of some recent vandalism acts (i.e. contribution cheating), I also accidentally removed the results of all your votes :(. I am really sorry and this situation is very unpleasant to me too. We've managed to restore most votes from the backups but the last month has been lost for good. Let me offer my deepest apologies for the incident. I've manually returned the rating to the main page posts, but the votes for other posts and commentaries of the last months have dropped to zero. To soothe the damage somehow, I can stress the popular notion that we are all here to solve problems and discuss the programming and the contribution is not nearly as important.

Yet every cloud has a silver lining: the incident has already inspired me to fix the daily backup system which had been malfunctioning ever since the infrastructure moved to the new server. By the way, the back-ups transfer every night to the VK data centre (our special thanks toVK) — so I'm not that afraid even of a nuclear bomb hitting the Saratov SU server room.

Besides, I guess it's high time we put effort into fight with spammers, bots and other vandals. The directions to work in have been voiced by the community members — we can limit the unrated members' actions, introduce captcha here and there, maybe there'll be something else.

Let me offer apologies once more, I hope I'll never ever re-live the emotions I experienced today. Just in case let me remind you that there is a beta letter in the logo not without a reason.

Now then, let me proudly present to you some small innovations.

  • Direct links to the submission. They are of the following form http://codeforces.net/contest/contestId/submission/submissionId and are available though a submission pop-up window (cluck the # symbol in the title).
  • We've introduced special Codeforces tags in posts/comments.

All tags possess the form [[tagName:param1,param2,...,paramN]], the square brackets are replaced by round ones in the examples below so that our innovations don't process the examples. Of course, when you use tags you should use square brackets. Now then, the details about the possible tags are as follows.

  • Write ((user:handle)) to add a link to the user profile. The link gets bound to the current date so that the user has the color and rank valid at the moment of publication. For example, you can write the following in a comment "((user:Petr)) is number one in the Codeforces rating".
  • Use ((contest:contestId)) to add a link to a contest. Such tag is displayed as a contest name but alternative contest is also acceptable. Try writing "I took part in the contest ((contest:115))" and also "I took part in the ((contest:115, contest))".
  • A link to contest results is pasted similarly: "the results are available via link ((standings:115))" and "the results are available via the ((standings:115,link))".
  • You can paste a link to problem (via the problem's code). E.g., "How to solve problem ((problem:115B))" or "how to solve ((problem:115B, this problem))".
  • And at last, you can past a direct link to submission. The examples are "here's the submission link: ((submission:700734))" or "here's ((submission:700734, the problem submission link))".

Of course one should copy carefully when writing a tag as the copied HTML styles can interfere with the tag's contest. And finally, let us demonstrate some examples in action:

That's the news for today,
MikeMirzayanov

  • Vote: I like it
  • +153
  • Vote: I do not like it

13 years ago, # |
← Rev. 6   Vote: I like it -10 Vote: I do not like it

Just one word - Thank You  MikeMirzayanov

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13 years ago, # |
← Rev. 2   Vote: I like it 0 Vote: I do not like it

verdict is not colored in solutions . like green for accepted : 700734

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13 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +1 Vote: I do not like it
Great, it's good how Codeforces are improving, I was missing a direct link to the submission until now.
It would be also nice to be able to see the whole input of a test case, now it's truncated if too long.
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  • 13 years ago, # ^ |
    ← Rev. 2   Vote: I like it 0 Vote: I do not like it

    Transmitting all of 10^6 bytes of input may be too tedious for CodeForces server.

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    • 13 years ago, # ^ |
        Vote: I like it +10 Vote: I do not like it
      Well, you are right, it may take too much space on screen to.
      But what about some manual download on-demand? I miss it sometimes when my solution always fails on same input and I  have no idea what's wrong.
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13 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it 0 Vote: I do not like it
Very good innovation.
The next should be something I asked some time ago: a standard "Contest editorials" section, maybe in the upper menu, Contest -> Editorials, where each editorial is organised like a wiki. It would be awesome if each editorial is divided in 5 section (one for each task) and you can modify (especially: you can create) each "paragraph". A system where every rated member, who solved that particular task, can write about its solution. Imagine if an user commits some changes, then the new version will go into an "approval queue" until some admin (or more simply, some red user) checks and confirms that edit.

It would be a great improvement, imho. And it is surely possibile (by a coder perspective).
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  • 13 years ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it +8 Vote: I do not like it
    Many "red users" are latent trolls, so enabling them approve changes would lead to very specific editorials.
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    • 13 years ago, # ^ |
        Vote: I like it 0 Vote: I do not like it
      Of course, implementation details of this "feature" are likely to be different than I described. Surely, the problem setter(s) should have "approval rights" on their own rounds. The important thing is to make this feature be real: it is often annoying (at least for me) when some editorials are missing, or aren't listed in the unofficial "main" post (link).
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13 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it 0 Vote: I do not like it
test: MikeMirzayanov
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13 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +4 Vote: I do not like it
one more test: MikeMirzayanov
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