On behalf of my unheard grey brothers I demand that we respect users with low rating!

Each day we see toxic comments like "if you're grey your opinion doesn't matter" or "I don't think grey advice would help me to advance to be blue".

No more!

Also grey users don't want to be shamed when they call programming tasks for what they truly are: the questions!

The high-ranked have consolidated much of the rating in the hands of a few! They use their talent and good education to boost and boost their ranks!

They create multi accounts to speed up the rating inflation and to get in the top-10 rated list with two, three of their accounts! They steal the rating of mere low rated people!

They cooperate with the administration which mostly ignores the high-rated multi accounts and cheating!

They create rounds like "Goodbye 2023" in order to destabilise the rating system even more and to make the low rated lose even more points!

We have nothing to lose but our grey colour! Let's consolidate in our struggle against the ratist!

Grey Lives Matter!

Greetings to every one who's looking forward to take part in NERC 2020. Many of you cold have seen the Special Regulation Rules for ICPC NERC in 2020/2021 Season.

In a nutshell -- quarterfinals (regional contests) can be held either online or offline (organizers consider that), half-finals (Northern Eurasia Finals) are held striclty online, each team can use three PCs, each team can use the Internet freely, it's not mandatory for a team to gather in line room, there's no proctoring system at all. Also best teams of NEF will advance to World Finals 2021 Selection Round, its exact rules are not yet known. So, some kind of a rehearsal before Super Regional Finals that should come in effect in 2026 or later.

And completely another situation in the special rules for Russian School Team Contest (RSTC?) for the same year -- it's held online but any team should gather in one place, should use only one PC and only a set of specific Internet pages. Also there's a proctoring system at all stages.

I understand that RSTC is held by Russian organizers online (IFMO mostly). Consider ICPC stages -- there's some pressure from ICPC directors. So the difference makes sense. Anyway, it's really huge, regional organizers should matter much more.

I think, NERC 2020 will have a number of obvious yet serious issues:

1) Cheating at all stages. The main thing that stops people from cheating -- is surveillance which is absent this time. Yeah, sure, you can't google much without nice skill but it's also difficult to control any communications between different teams and between teams and their coaches.

2) Almost complete lack of team work. Yeah, sure, the ones that are willing to work in a team still can do that. But the optimal strategy using 3 PCs means that people in a team shouldn't really communicate during first 4 hours of the contest. Well, except for distributing problems between people in the team.

3) There's no atmosphere of celebration and solemnity. You're just sitting at home and solving stuff which is no different from regualar Codeforces rounds even if they're cool. Just having your team in the same room would give you much more energy, mood, excitement even if all the other teams are not there physically.

It's just my opinion and it doesn't affect anything by itself, but I'd like to know what all the participant think regarding this topic. I think, combined opinions has more weight and the organizers could listen to it.

I personally ask NercNews to add some kind of proctoring to NERC 2020. The contest is important enough to do all the things possible to hold it successfully even in this time of Corona lockdown without lose of traditions.

Since the first div. 3 round there were 23 of them and probably some of you noticed that the rounds have become quite difficult for their target audience -- people with rating below 1600. More and more often only 3-4 problems out of 6-7 total are really being solved by the official participants, while the rest of the problems are only solved by 100-200 people many of whom participate out of competition.

Not to be biased we can use such a tool as problem difficulty, a recent feature of codeforces. In the table below you can see round numbers, below -- amount of problems with difficulty 1600 and less in the particular round, below -- total amount of problems in the round.

Information in the right says that in average in a div. 3 round only 3.7 problems from about 7 in total have difficulty 1600 or less, which is only 55.8% of all problems of the round. Div. 3 announces allege that the rounds are going to be interesting for people with rating below 1600 and will seem easy to people with rating 1600-1899 and to people from div. 1. While in fact half of the problems of a div. 3 round are interesting to people with blue, purple and orange nicknames. So often purple guys can't really solve one or two problems of a div. 3 round.

We could compare that with statistics on educational round, that are pretty much prepared by the same people.

Round number in the first row, amount of problems with difficulty 1600 or less in the second row, total amount of problems in the third row, amount of problems with difficulty 2100 or less in the fourth row.

The statistics says, that in average educational rounds have only one easy (<= 1600 difficulty) problem more that div. 3 rounds. An educational rounds have the same problem when only 4 out of 7 problems have the difficulty of 2100 or less, which is the target audience. Last 2-3 problems of those round are only solved by a few people, mostly from out of competition.

How could we fix that?

1) Transfer too difficult problems from educational round to div. 1 rounds so that the latter ones could appear more often 2) Vacant places could be filled with too difficult problems from div. 3 rounds 3) Vacant places in div. 3 round could be filled with problems proposed by codeforces users

The more problems for the target audience are in the round, the less the difficulty gap between them. That could allow to make the ability to solve problems significant, not the ability to code fast.

Hej Codeforces!

So I held a city level contest at my university today But all the contestants kept getting a 403 error trying to use codeforces I guess that's because they used about 20 PCs simultaneously and those PCs have the same IP as they belong to the university's local network Any tips on how I could avoid such a thing in future contests? Thanks in advance