Your New Topcoder Home as We Bring Back /TC
If you’ve been part of our community for a while, say more than ten years, you’ll know what /tc means. Slash TC was the member hub of our community for the longest time and many members to this day still use that bookmarked link to access Topcoder. We had all the latest news and the most important things you wanted all in one spot.
I wanted something like /tc back; a place for all the latest info that we share on our community weekly chats to live. With the help of my amazing community team, our talent designers, and the awesome beta tester crew, we have the all new Topcoder home page.
It’s everything you want and everything you need to keep track of what’s going on and what’s coming up.
What do we need to know about this new home?
We realized that there was a need to centralize all your Topcoder information. Now you have one place to find everything you’re looking for:
- See the latest competitions feed.
- Find the most recently launched freelance gigs.
- Find articles, blogs, and news bits about Topcoder, the tech industry, and educational opportunities.
Most importantly, every time you hit that page, it will be a fresh listing of the latest.
What more is to come?
This first version of the new home is focused on giving you the most current information. It was designed to be the hub for news and make sure you knew where to go for the latest information. When we shared this page with our beta tester group, most of them asked for more! Their amazing feedback showed us not only the need for this type of page but a more impactful version of it.
Next will be the ability to see your personal competition and gig information plus the ability for you to decide what you want to see or not see. If you want to learn more or maybe help us get the new home to be the best it can be, check out our beta tester program to help advocate for our community.
We hope you love our home page, the reincarnation of /tc. Please share your feedback with us here!
Comments
Wohooo! This is the stuff, exciting!
We should add live streaming hubs or notifications when events are going on such as webinars, monday calls, regionals, tco, hangouts, etc.
The centralization you have done where we can easily access different parts of topcoder from thrive to gigs, and also getting sneak peaks of the latest information is pretty awesome.
Bravo!. Spiced up page. Very easy to navigate through, this is a major milestone
Hey @mahestro we alredy have that in the central placed banner below the slider:
"Topcoder Hangout: TOPCODER HANGOUT FRIDAY #2. MEET, PLAY & WIN.
Friday Oct 8, 2021 | 07:00 UTC-4. Register here"
Guess what? Hangout #2 is next cool event we have
Yeah! It's going to be wonderful!
I meant live cast of those events as they happen. Instead of going through the process of registering, clicking links, etc. Would be cool to have all these events available there as they happen and their archives in case I miss one.
Love it!
I don't see anything here that helps with marathon matches, either for new people that might be interested or people with some experience.
Thanks for your feedback! MMs will show up in the most recent challenges feed.
We can also consider adding a calendar somewhere to show them.
This has nothing to do with my friend, Jessy, although it just happens to be a reply to her post. I really love TopCoder and want to see it be popular and wonderful.
But this "answer" demonstrates the some of the problems that marathon matches have at TopCoder.
1, Stating that problems appear in the challenges feed is not helpful unless you are already familar with the TopCoder platform. The vast majority of theTopcoder Staff, apparently, do not know that, otherwise I assume some effort would have been made to provide an easy to find, gentle introduction to marathon matches.
2, Making a calendar with matches scheduled in advance is nearly impossible given the way that marathon matches are currently run. Again apparetly the majority of TopCoder staff are not associated with the mechanics of running of marathon matches and are completely unaware of the last minute nature of each contest.
As far as I know there is no promotion for marathon matches, no effort to recruit new competitors, no effort to encourge new competitors by providing tutorial information, no effort to supply practice problems, no access to past problem statements or even the names of past problems, no way to test a solution (non-locally) after a contest is closed (that gives a relative score against any other submitted solutions like we used to have). If there is some way to do any of these it is well hidden.
Even when there is a contest running there is no obvious way to find it. Saying that it appears in the challenges feed is not helpful to someone that is not a member and does not already do challenges. The matches are shoehorned into and well hidden in "challenges" system and the "data science" category even though they are typically not data science problems and the people that do actual data science problems are interested in "real world" problems and making money and are likely not intrested in these types of problems or recreational programming in general. EVEN THOUGH "they are in the challenges feed" IS THE BEST ANSWER GIVEN, THAT ANSWER DOES NOT APPEAR IN ANY EASY TO FIND PLACE ON THE WEB SITE.
There is a nice link called "competitive programming" on the new home page. One might expect to find some information or even a mention about marathon matches somewhere under that link, but no. It is a nice slick page about SRMs and how to compete in them. This kind of page could be the beginning of exactly what marathon matches need. Why doesn't it exist?
One should be able to Google "marathon match" and have the first hit lead right to some useful information.
There is still no obvious calendar for marathon matches. One of the reasons for this is that problems are not finalized until the last minute. There is not a large pool of problem writers and testers and there is no queue of ready-to-run problems that could be used for matches scheduled in advance. This has in the past caused matches to be rushed out of the door with insufficient review and testing leaving serious issues which degraded the contest (although recently this seems to have improved). As far as I know THERE ARE NO WRITTEN GUIDELINES ON HOW TO WRITE A PROBLEM so problem statement styles and quality are varied, although there is finally a nice template for writing a tester/visualizer that encourages some consistency, saves a lot of time and provides some new useful functionality (good job there, thanks, that is exactly the kind of thing we need). Please schedule matches well in advance with the problems tested and edited at least a month before the contest.
In the past I have complained about this suituation and stated that I believe that, because they provide no income, TopCoder management does not actually care about marathon matches and does not want to put any effort or expense into managing and improving them. I have received answers that "oh yes we really do care, it is very important to us and we will definitely address these issues" -- AND THEN NOTHING HAPPENS. I became so tired of this all-promise no-action situation (mostly with the quality of the matches when the platform transitioned) that I quit competing after being an enthusiastic TopCoder supporter for something like fifteen or twenty years. I still have some hope (thus this rant) that the situation will improve and marathon matches will survive and grow and be of high quality and I will feel good about returning to competition, but I am not holding my breath.