Hi Guys,- I am only 2 contests old on codeforces but the way the competition is organized and the level of participation impresses me a lot. I thought therefore to write my views over the benefits of using codeforces

CODEFORCES

1. A very good ELO rating system . Quite balanced and relative for all.
2. Regular competitions. This one is very good for a person who is new to coding(like me) and wants to get into the groove of things as fast as possible . A competition almost every week ensures that one doesn't have to go here and there for online competitions.
3. The problems are good in a sense that they are usually set by people having very good intellect and experience. A competition involves problems on 4-5 different .
4. Testing system — Like topcoder the hacking system during a running contest ensures that a problem has a lot of good test cases for program to pass. One has to make his program time efficient and considering each and every test case otherwise if it gets hacked in the end one could loose easy points because of that. We usually get to learn it a hard way when a 500 point problem goes away for some silly mistake.
5. One gets to know where his program went wrong because the test cases on which the program was tested are shown to every user with the time it took for each test case. So here one gets to know very well the efficiency of his solution and the place where it actually went wrong.
6. A 2 hour contest is ideal because it neither doesn't take a lot of time from your busy schedule and involves adrenaline rush throughout the competition because the price of a problem goes on decreasing as the competition advances. Another advantage is that usually in a 3 to 3.5 hour contest one gets a way to cheat on stack overflow or stack exchange because one may usually get good replies there within 1 hour(I have seen a lot of that on codechef cook off) .
7. The website runs awesome . Its very smooth during a competition and things start as and when supposed to. there are hardly any performance glitches during a competition.Usually codechef has a lot of it during its contests.
8. Following a top coder system of Room divisions and rating division is also very helpful because one gets questions which if he tries can solve.

so this was what I like about codeforces ... though there might be some points left i would like to know if in the contribution part one can give his/her problems for competitions even if one is not red or orange so that one gets to think of problems outside the domain of the available problems...