Hi codeforces!
A group of friends and I were recently working towards proposing a contest, since we had many ideas and one of my friends recently reached master. After figuring out most of the problems, we decided to propose the contest earlier today, but I encountered an interesting problem that I did not find a blog for, explaining the solution.
After my friend sent the invitation to coauthor the contest, I could see all of the problems that we had written so far, but I could not edit or create any new problems.
On my friend's screen, he could see the normal 5 bars which allows him to create problems:
However, on my screen, I can only see:
No matter what I do, it does not seem like I am able to propose a problem. For now, I have sent all of the information to my friends through discord and they have uploaded the problems, but it is super inconvenient and also very unproductive. Is this intentional (and if so, why would codeforces want to block me and not my friends), or is this a bug?
If it is a bug, I would appreciate it so much if it were fixed.
Note: this is not a complaint; the systems that the codeforces staff has been able to create is wonderful and much appreciated. Rather, this is an inquiry into why I do not have the ability to propose problems, as I have not found any other resources on codeforces that answer my question. If anyone can link a blog, that would also be excellent!
I was working with Apple_Method and I could access and edit the problems even though he couldn't.
I have the same problem as you.
I know this isn't related to the blog itself but can anyone tell me what are the requirement (minimum rating etc.) to propose a contest ?
There is a nice blog by KAN about this at https://mirror.codeforces.com/blog/entry/85259. There isn't a minimum rating (as long as you have a friend who is master and is willing to set the contest with you or if you have enough experience setting problems), but generally cp experience would lead to better problems. We started this project after one of our friends hit master.
You can edit problems, but you can't propose new ones. Why do you want to propose the problem by yourself? your friend can propose it for you and then you can work on it later on.
but I could not edit or create any new problems.
He cannot edit either.
I have a guess, which I suppose is better than nothing?
At some point, your friends were probably listed as a writer of a gym contest. (In fact, if they are who I think they are, I was the one who added them as a writer.) This gave them contest writing perms across the entire system, which is why they are able to see all the problem writing options.
I checked with another friend who I added as a writer to a different gym, and he is able to see all the problemsetting tabs as well. And this guess fits with the comments from lce4113 and lunchbox. So at least it matches the 4 data points we have.
The best way to test this would be for you to get listed as a writer for a gym, and see if that allows you to view the different problem writing options. Ping me on Discord if you want to try this out.
Also, congrats to your friend for making orange!
I just tested this with lunchbox and it seems to work.
So it looks like once somebody adds you as a gym contest writer, you get contest writing permissions across all of Codeforces.