I suggest "temporarily" disable "Talks" function for those who are competing in official competition.

In today's CF #272 competition, I got contest1234's message which want to get a copy my code.

I thought it's a little annoying and this is cheating, so I didn't reply.

Of course, when contest is ended, then this function should be available again :)

Updated:

My statements seems a little misleading.

I think competitors "in contest" should not be allowed to send/receive any message (excepts "Questions about problems" function in their contest or send to/receive from those who manage the contest).

I'm curious about the ordering of tests.

Of course, pretests should placed first.

Then is the system tests (some contest may append the hacks).

Would it better to reorder the tests according to their running times to accelerate the system test?

Using standard solution or some Accepted-like solution to do profiling, then reorder of the tests from short-time to long-time, wish we can give "Wrong answer" earlier?

Or just put the extremest case (almost all solution will fail) after the pretests?

I'm a little curious about CF's back-end for each contest.

In my country, Taiwan, there is an "educational" certification for average-level and low-level students who may not talented in programming called CPE (Collegiate Programming Examination).

They hold 4 times every year. There are about 1500 students, partitioned into about 50 exam rooms, connected through Internet, to participate this contest at the same time.

Even I haven't participated in CPE yet, but in my experience in ACM-ICPC regional, the PC^2 system are somehow slow to wait for my verdict if there is a lot of submissions in a short time.

I know there are some well-known jury systems like DOMjudge, CMS (recently used by IOI), etc.

Recently, some students participated in CPE argue that the judge process is slow, and the CPE system is modified from the DOMjudge.

I'm wondering is there an efficient jury system to meet such heavy load.

Well, I know the contest rule in CF is different from the one in ACM-ICPC (the CPE rule is same as ACM-ICPC), also different from the Google Code Jam.

Is there a jury system using ACM-ICPC rule and can hold maybe up to 5000 even 10000 contestants?

Maybe the most important factor is hardware issue (how many computers to absorb the submissions) not just software (jury system).

It seems the Cloud Computing is the trend in recent years. So how to scale up the jury system to hold more contestants?

This is very interesting.

The UVa online judge seems to renew their website (but I don't know their current progress), I'm looking forward to see it!