Project Euler Forum

First and foremost, thank you for putting this site together. I have been telling everyone in my circle of friends (who would enjoy these types of problems) to give the site a try. As you can imagine, almost all my friends have become hooked. Nevertheless, there are a few features missing from Project Euler that I believe would improve the overall experience. I apologize if these suggestions have been voiced before; I did a quick search of the forums and came up empty.

1. Friends List: It would be great to be able to keep tabs on my friend's progress through Project Euler. By inviting (and challenging) my friends... this has not only created the personal satisfaction of solving these challenging questions.. but has also added a touch of personal (and friendly) competition among my friends. It's currently way too hard to track down my friends to see where they are on the genius ladder in relation to me.

2. Registration: I found it quite grim that I had to register for both the site and the forums. I believe the logins should be unified such that when you register for one or the other, the experience is seamless. This would not only improve usability but also encourage users to post more on the forums. I originally didn't bother because of the registration requirement(s).

3. Please add "PowerShell" to the list of languages in the profile menu. I am currently marked as C# which is technically correct but would prefer to see how many other PowerShell users there are =). Thanks.

Again, these are merely some suggestions that I believe would improve my already wonderful time on Project Euler.

Thanks,
Navid

navid wrote: 1. Friends List: It would be great to be able to keep tabs on my friend's progress through Project Euler. By inviting (and challenging) my friends... this has not only created the personal satisfaction of solving these challenging questions.. but has also added a touch of personal (and friendly) competition among my friends. It's currently way too hard to track down my friends to see where they are on the genius ladder in relation to me.

I second that. It would be very helpful to see a "diff" of the problems between two usernames, so that one could track the problems solved by one's mates/colleagues/competitors and easier see the genius ladder.

TIA,

@navid

1. A nice idea which I will look in to. Perhaps I could add a "friends" checkbox next to each username and enable a filter.
2. I know exactly what you mean. Unfortunately I wrote all the scripts for projecteuler.net, but this incredibly powerful forum software is public domain. I cannot think of a way of automatically injecting membership from one to the other without compromising security/privacy. This has been one of my greatest challenges to date and is something I continue to work on.
3. Done!

And I'm glad you and your friends have enjoyed the challenges.

I have an additional suggestion for Scores, Distribution of Points: My suggestion is to include the dates of the correct answers in the 'Distribution of Points' list.
Kind regards, Per E. Pedersen

Sadly the database has no record of the time/date that a particular problem was solved, only which problems and the time/date that the last correct answer was submitted. As a standard (unix) time stamp occupies 4 bytes, there are currently just over 12000 registered/active users, and 66 problems that would equate to an increase in the size of the user database of approximately 7.6MB. That's double its current size!