Achievements can be a great way to track personal progress, and see how much you have progressed. Furthermore, I think it would be a pretty good motivating factor towards practicing Competitive Programming more.

General outline of achievement tab on user profile

Achievement examples:

• [Achievement] + [date obtained]: Reaching Specialist!

• [Achievement] + [date obtained]: Reaching Expert!

• [Achievement] + [date obtained]: Logging on Codeforces daily for a year!

• [Achievement] + [date obtained]: Top 1000 in a Div 2. Contest!

• [Achievement] + [date obtained]: Fullsolved a Div 2. Contest!

These are just some rough ideas for achievement functionality.

Conclusion

This is just my suggestion towards an achievement system, so it is probably flawed in a lot of areas, but I just wanted to pitch in my ideas to the community!

Feel free to comment any additions to this idea/flaws about this idea. I am open to any criticism about this.

My Suggestions for the Upvote/Downvote System:

The current system only allows you to upvote/downvote comments once, and you are unable to change that decision. I feel like there are some flaws with this, so I have two main suggestions.

Change it so that users can change the decision about upvoting/downvoting.

Rationale: Many people mis-click the upvote/downvote button, and cause them to accidentally downvote/upvote a certain blog/comment. Also, people change their minds on their decisions for upvoting/downvoting, so it would be beneficial if you could change your decision.

Change it so that blogs/comments show both the amount of upvotes and downvotes.

Rationale: When a blog/comment shows both upvotes and downvotes would show a more holistic story. It would also show the amount of people that have inputted their opinions on the blog/comment. Typically, a small sample size is less representative than a bigger one.

These are just my suggestions. I understand that these suggestions would probably be incredibly hard to implement to the actual Codeforces platform.

When I was looking through submissions, I found dadadased's submission and found it extremely peculiar.

His submissions for Problem E (E — Koxia and Tree) — https://mirror.codeforces.com/contest/1770/submission/187363250

His submissions for Problem D (D — Koxia and Game) — https://mirror.codeforces.com/contest/1770/submission/187318573

His submissions for Problem C (C — Koxia and Number Theory) — https://mirror.codeforces.com/contest/1770/submission/187293457

Just to clarify, I'm not entirely sure if dadadased cheated, but I wanted to post this to spread awareness and to get confirmation that dadadased did cheat.

What is your personal goal for 2023?

• Pupil —

• Specialist —

• Expert —

• Candidate Master —

• Master —

• International Master —

• Grandmaster —

• International Grandmaster —

• Legendary Grandmaster —

• Petition for MikeMirzayanov to hand out Headquarters role for New Year wishes — jk

Hopefully the new year will be significantly better than this year!

has inspired me to continue with my CP Journey! I started coding after discovering about Radewoosh's history in CP, so, to honor him, I made a drawing of him. Thank you Radewoosh for inspiring me to begin learning such an incredible subject.

Edit: Radewoosh has responded! Please show him appreciation!

Hi, I decided to post this blog to share various books and resources I used for Competitive Programming! I feel that these books were beneficial to my Competitive Programming journey.

lnishan posted blog that has a lot of extensive resources.

kostka has also posted a blog with a really detailed book that is definitely worth checking out!

Codeforces Education is also a really great resource!

General Competitive Programming Books:

• Competitive Programming Handbook

• Competitive Programming 3

• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Programming Contests

"Introduction to Algorithms" by Cormen et. al.

"Algorithms" by Sedgewick.

"The Design and Analysis of Algorithms" by Kozen.

"Algorithms in C/C++ Parts 1-5" by Sedgewick.

"Introduction to the Analysis of Algorithms" by Sedgewick, Flajolet.

"Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" by Sussman, Abelson.

"Art of Computer Programming" by Knuth (reference).

Algorithms and Data Structures

• Guide to Dynamic Programming

• Courses:

Coursera Algorithms (I)

Coursera Algorithms (II)

Coursera Algorithms (III)

MIT OCW (Introduction to Algorithms)

MIT OCW (Algorithm Design/Analysis)

MIT OCW (Advanced Data Structures)

• Other Resources:

Big-O cheat sheet

Introductory Resources

• MITX ON EDX COURSE SEQUENCE

Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python

Introduction to Computational Thinking and Data Science​

• MIT ON-CAMPUS VIDEO LECTURES

Introduction to Computation and Programming Using Python

Resources on learning programming languages: These are some books for if you are just starting to learn a programming language, or deciding to switch to a programming language:

• Bronze/Silver USACO Books by Darren Yao — Java
• Bronze/Silver USACO Books by Darren Yao — C++
• C++ Basic to Advanced Video
• Java Full Course Video
• Python Full Course Video
• Sololearn

List of practice problems

• Atcoder Library
• EJOI
• EOI
• USACO
• CSES
• Kattis
• POJ
• SPOJ
• Timus

Hope you find this useful!