SPIRiT_1984's blog

By SPIRiT_1984, 15 years ago, In English

Right now the site is functioning stable, but some improvements could be useful, since some things are wery annoying.

I think this site is really great. I really enjoyed posting here and taking part in CF Beta 3 round (nice problems, BTW). But some things seem a little bit annoying to me, and they could be modified a little bit.

1. It would be nice, if there would be a link to post history on the user profile page, since right now this is a little bit weird - you cannot see even your own post history, if you want to. For example, I wanted to find the entry with discussion about CF Beta 3 problems, but it took some time, since I could not get to this discussion through my posts there, and this discussion was not in Recent Actions list. Found it through the tag links.

2. And that brings us to another problem, it would be nice to have some categorys for blog entries (the most important ones, I guess). I would suggest at least categories "FAQ", "Editorials" (after the contest is over, it is supposed to have a editorial, I guess), "Tutorials" (may include entries with links to useful books).

3. As for the contests itself. Since the problem statements say that program should work with standard input/output streams, it may become hard to test the sample statement (each time to type it). And, if contestants will redirect streams in his solution code, he may forget to comment these lines before sumbitting. It would be nice, if there would be some sort of environment variable or constant defined, like on ACM servers. After that it turns out much easier. For example, on ACM servers  (with ONLINE_JUDGE pseudoconstant defined) I use something like this in my code:

#ifndef ONLINE_JUDGE
freopen("input.txt","rt",stdin);
freopen("output.txt","wt",stdout);
#endif

There - no problems, works fine at contestant computer and both the online contester.

Upd:

The problem 3 (with streams) is solved, since right now I am using Emacs for writing and standard make utility for compiling and executing, therefore it's quite simple to redirect the streams in the make file.

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15 years ago, # |
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One more improvement that comes to mind:
When in a contest, how about making the "Problems" link a dropdown menu? It would save one click and page refresh.

Aside from that, I really like the site's concept and am looking forward to competing more often here.