Hello Codeforces!

It's been a while since our last blog post. We've been working hard on several features that we are happy to share with you.

Gmail spam

First of all, we suspect some of our users using gmail didn't get our last emails, as they were considered spam. If you wish to further receive emails from us please check your spam folder and move the emails to inbox.

Enforced templates

All the interview problems, except for those that were used in CSA rounds, now support enforced templates in C++, Java, Python and Javascript. Basically, the template takes care of reading the input, calling the function you need to implement and printing the result. You can concentrate on solving the problem, not having to worry about all the messy details.

Interviews

This new section allows you to take an interview on demand. You can choose the difficulty and duration. The tasks are selected from those you didn't solve yet in the interview archive. You can access the interview section here.

Hourly contests

Every half-hour, a contest starts on CS Academy: every full hour highlights an algorithms-style contest and every hour-and-a-half an interview-style contest. This feature was introduced to reach a a few different points:

• give users an incentive to stay on the website for a longer period of time
• bring old but great problems back into attention
• add a bit of competitiveness outside our regular rounds
• most of all, make the problem-solving experience a bit more fun

The problems are chosen from the archives, in a way that tries to ensure none of the participants had previously solved them.

Rating changes

As some of you noticed, we had a bug in the rating algorithm. We fixed it and recalculated all the ratings. We decided to change the cutoffs for red at 1700 and for yellow at 1600.

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