Codeforces
Codeforces is a Russian website dedicated to competitive programming. It was created and is maintained by group of sportsmen from Saratov State University led by Mikhail Mirzayanov.
Overview
Codeforces provides to all users following main services:
- participation in the short (2-hours) contests, so-called "Codeforces Rounds", held about once a week;
- ability to solve problems from previous contests for training purposes;
- "polygon" for creating and testing problems;
- kind of social-networking by using of internal public blogs.
Contestants are rated by system similar to ELO. There are usually no prizes for winners, though 100 winners of 100-th Codeforces Round received a T-Shirt. Some bigger contests (mostly country internal) are hosted on Codeforces base, among them "Yandex Algorithm 2011", provided by Yandex - one of biggest Russian IT-companies.
History
First Codeforces Round was held on the February 19 in 2010 with 175 participants. As of end of January 2012 over 100 rounds were held, with usual number of registrants over 2000 . Before 2012 Codeforces Round were titled "Codeforces Beta Rounds" which means that development phase is still on. However development of interconnected facilities, like trainings, virtual contests, new blog and interface features etc.
Criticism
Minor expressions of users' discontent could be found in Codeforces blogs (in Russian), mostly around following points:
- lack of censorship of blogs;
- administrative point of view on the social part of resource;
- ways of development of the resource (administration do not always strictly follow users wishes and feature-requests).
However number of participants in each round and quantity of posts in the blogs shows that resource is very popular among its users.[citation needed]