Project Euler Forum

It'd be cool if there was some sort of publicly-available view of a given user's stats, the availability of which would be controlled by a profile switch, of course. So I could hit .../index.php?section=scores&user=barneyb or something and get back a page that listed the problems I've solved and when I solved them, along with a summary table containing level, current performance, etc. Even better, the raw data would be available as some sort of feed (json, xml, whatever) as well.

I'd be more than happy to do the development of the feature for review and possible inclusion if I could get the source of the site. I'd be happy to sign an NDA or whatever if there's sensitive stuff in there.

While a good idea, I'm afraid you will see this message soon:

hk wrote:Currently we are not able to handle any functional requests that imply changing the functioning of the website or this forum.
Sorry.

Yeah, I know. But since I volunteered to do all the development, I'm hoping I have a chance. It'd be a shame to have to write a screen scraper for the profile page. Doable, though, and even packagable as a service if people are willing to provide their login credentials. We'll see.

It seems quite a nice request - I'd find it useful.

I'm not sure why the site won't allow users to see other users profiles without logging in. Obviously the reason for this would likely be a reason against allowing sites to provide XML feeds and user "badges" with stats on them.

Doing a scrape actually turned out to be quite simple since they actually generate good markup that can be run through an XML parser. After that, it was just a matter of querying for the relevant nodes and caching the data for later display. Generic authentication proved no more difficult. For obvious reasons, I'm not going to be sharing any more details, but the concept has been proven. Unfortunately, it's not really math, because there are some gloriously self-referential problems lurking in this space.

Then this site could become something to show off.
"Want to know how smart I am? Check my score on ProjectEuler! "

Is that what you guys want?

Not really. I've a few friends that registered and work on the problems, along with a few others that just go look at the ones they here us talk about and think are interesting. Obviously the former group can log in and find my profile to see which problems I've solved, but it's not as handy as just hitting my blog. The latter group is prevented any information at all, of course.

So while I suppose the functionality could be used for pure bragging, that wasn't my objective.

Please see viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1466
I got the scores by screen scraping. If you need, I can make available a REST interface.

Best regards,
Raj