"The current UVa Online Judge platform is almost 7 years old. It calls for a well deserved retirement. Help us bringing UVa OJ to today's web."
Miguel Revilla and the UVa OJ team are planning to upgrade the UVa OJ! That means building the platform from scratch, and to do that, they need financial support. I think this website means a lot to many people in the competitive programming community, and so I think we should do our best to support them.
Here is a link to the fundraiser:
And of course, the UVa OJ website:
If they replace the byte-by-byte checkers (giving randomly either WA or PE when you print one space too much) in all the old problems with whitespace-ignoring token-by-token checkers, then I'm all in.
It sounds like they're welcoming feedback like that from the community. Furthermore, the project will become open source at some point, so we may be able to fix that ourselves (although this may be a more problem-specific issue rather than a platform issue, but we'll see).
Open source doesn't mean that you can make arbitrary changes and they will make their way into the live app. However, I trust that they know that this is pretty much THE problem with Uva (at least the way I see it). It makes running team practices a PITA when you don't know whether your WAs are "real". I also agree that the problem is probably on a task-by-task basis. But while they're at changing everything, that could be done too ;)
There are only 6 days left of the campaign. I encourage everyone to pass the message on to people who may be interested.