On August 8, 2026, the first edition of the Upper Egypt Programming Contest (UEPC 2026) took place. We are excited to announce that the contest is now available for practice in the Codeforces Gym! You can find it here.

UEPC is a multi-university programming competition for students across Upper Egypt. Its first edition attracted more than 100 teams in the qualification round, with 24 teams from five universities advancing to the onsite finals: Luxor University, South Valley University, Sohag University, Assiut University, and Minya University.

UEPC 2026 participants and volunteers.

Congratulations to Keda Reda from South Valley University on winning the first edition and becoming the first UEPC champions!

I would like to thank our judges and problem setters:

yse, AbdoSa3d, AnasMaged, Baskot, MUZAN, MahmoudAshour, Mohamed_Alassal, WisdomCasual, and cgmoreda.

Thanks to our testers:

_Sherbiny, 3bkarm, 4aii_Blabn, El_Hefnawy, Hassan_Rashed, Hazemam, Karam, Kareem_Elgoker, MayarSayed3, Mo_Austa, Mohamed_Waheed, Mr_figoo, Mr_Turtle_, Omar_Farhan, scheitern_1, and Shahd205.

We would also like to thank all the organizers and volunteers whose efforts made the event possible.

Special thanks to icpcassiut.org for sponsoring the contest and to Badr University in Assiut for hosting it.

We hope you enjoy the problems. Good luck and have fun!

Hey, for the last few days I've been getting a raw html 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable from the codeforces api on contest.standings.

unsigned requests seem to work, but when i use the signed/authenticated request, it fails. i already made a new api key too, same result.

Also it's not the usual json api error response, it's just the actual 503 page.

is anyone else facing this recently? and is there any solution or workaround?

at this point I'm just trying to figure out whether this is something on my side or something on codeforces side.

Hello, Codeforces community!

Lately, AI-assisted submissions have gotten out of hand, making contests less fair and a lot less fun for those competing honestly.

My idea is simple: add a second Elo system, separate from the current one, just for AI users. When you register for a contest, you choose whether you’ll be using AI or not, and you’ll be ranked with others who made the same choice.

Of course, it’s not a perfect fix—some people might still break the rules—but I think it could keep about 70–80% of AI users out of the main competition. Plus, a lot of them might actually want to join the AI track to climb a separate leaderboard.

This was just a random idea that popped into my head. I’m not sure how easy it would be to pull off, but I thought it was worth sharing and hearing what you all think!