New and improved coding challenges

Question

TLDR: We are making some UX improvements to Coding Challenges, and releasing a new challenge each day during the week of September 15, 2025.

A challenge a day keeps boredom away

Each day next week, starting on Monday September 15, we will be releasing a new challenge prompt for users to participate in! Check back each day to see if the new challenge is something that would be interesting, fun, or a good learning opportunity for you. They will cover a diverse range of skills and topics, so we encourage users to take on whichever ones suit them best.

Each of these challenges will have a two week open period, where entries can be submitted, and then a one week voting period where the entries will be visible to all users and can be voted up or down (see this update below!) based on quality.

Some of these new challenges are inspired by suggestions made in the sandbox. Keep adding your ideas there! Users whose ideas are adopted for challenges (usually with some tweaks) will be acknowledged in the challenge prompt and will receive a new challenge creator badge (coming soon).

We will continue posting new challenges at a regular cadence (tbd) after this initial run.

Improved user experience

We are also excited to announce some improvements to Coding Challenges. All new challenges published will include the following features:

It is now possible to downvote both challenges and challenge entries, as well as upvote them. This change has also been made available on the completed challenges.
Removing “highest score” as a sorting option until the voting period is complete.
Hiding challenge entries’ post scores until the voting period is complete.

The goal of these three changes together is to address the fastest gun in the west problem, which multiple users have called out. This will begin to level the playing field during the voting period, so that entries submitted at any time during the open period have a fair shot at being judged based on their quality, rather than those that were posted first and/or amassed upvotes earliest, having a big leg up in the competition.

We want to provide the best experience that we can for Stack Overflow users who want to take on a challenge. We have kept track of the features and fixes that users have asked for, and are planning more improvements to come later on, as we also continue to publish new challenge prompts.

On the plus side, this finally (re)introduced downvotes into Discussions. — Thom A, Commented Sep 12 at 10:15
Just out of curiosity, why so many challenges all at once? One per day seems like it could be a bit overwhelming if one wants to participate in all of them. Maybe one per week would be more manageable, still having two weeks to complete each. Is this new frequency just for the initial release to gauge interest in different challenge types? — Daniel Black, Commented Sep 12 at 15:38
@DanielBlack different challenges may be better suited towards different technologies, experiences, and difficulty levels, so most people may not be interested in trying to complete all 5 - although that would be pretty cool, for those that want an extra challenge (pun intended)! This new frequency is just for next week, we are still figuring out what the cadence for releasing new challenges is going to be after that. But we are hoping everyone who is interested will be able to find at least one, out of the 5 next week, that they want to participate in. — Sasha, Commented Sep 12 at 17:01
I have a nagging feeling that the answers will be used to train AI, so I have zero interest in doing coding challenges on SO — Hans Kilian, Commented Sep 18 at 6:45
@HansKilian If it looks at my code, that AI's gonna be giving out bad advice for years. — Twineee The Zelda Wizard, Commented Sep 18 at 21:59
@HansKilian You might have overslept last few years. Everything you post on Stack Overflow and other sites in the network will be used to train AI. See Our Partnership with OpenAI and Our partnership with Google and commitment to socially responsible AI — Dalija Prasnikar, Commented Sep 21 at 8:25
About Code Challenge #6: Integer Counting, it says that the challenge is "Given a list of 1 million random numbers, find the number that appears the most.", so if more than 1 number appear the same amount of times but also appear more times than all the other numbers in the list, what should the program do? Show all the numbers that repeat that number of times? Show only one number? Which number? — isrnick, Commented Sep 23 at 17:57
@isrnick good question. if there's a tie, then you can return all the numbers that are tied for appearing the most. — setman, Commented Sep 25 at 21:13
Will the winning entries be archived somewhere for later perusal? — Mast, Commented Sep 26 at 12:24
@setman: for Code Challenge #6: Integer Counting, instead of saying "you can return all most-common integers", you mean "you must return all...". Also, can we return them order-independent (makes the code easier)? (The challenge question needs to accept comments, where these clarifications can be ironed out quickly, or allow users post counterfactuals - essential on LeetCode.) — smci, Commented Sep 27 at 3:43
@smci Yes, return all and order-independent is fine. Good clarification. I'm hoping we can get comments on the challenge question soon. — setman, Commented Sep 30 at 20:05
Counting integers is a duplicate of stackoverflow.com/questions/37365512/… — Twineee The Zelda Wizard, Commented Oct 8 at 16:33

Thom A · Accepted Answer · 2025-09-12 10:43:38Z

21

Regarding these statements:

Removing “highest score” as a sorting option until the voting period is complete.

The goal of these three changes together is to address the fastest gun in the west problem, which multiple users have called out.

So what is the default sort order now? If it's oldest then that doesn't change anything; the FGITW will be displayed first and thus continues to have the most "eyes" on it thus has the highest chance of those "eyes" voting on it. The sort order should likely be arbitrary until voting is public, like when you view the candidates during a moderator election.

edited Sep 12 at 10:43

answered Sep 12 at 10:20

Thom AMod

97.5k88 gold badges148148 silver badges233233 bronze badges

6

Those are valid points! We're going to change the default sort to newest, which is a bit more fair. Longer term, we'd like to explore a random sort but have to balance it with other improvement ideas. Appreciate the feedback.

setman
– setman StaffMod

2025-09-15 18:22:12 +00:00
Commented Sep 15 at 18:22
5

@setman I think the random sort is the best solution for this problem.

oBrstisf8o
– oBrstisf8o

2025-09-19 09:00:45 +00:00
Commented Sep 19 at 9:00
i mean... unless you want voting to mean anything, random sort with no ability to sort by score, along with voting having no other impact, leads to it not mattering that voting exists.

Kevin B
– Kevin B

2025-09-22 15:56:24 +00:00
Commented Sep 22 at 15:56
1

@KevinB it would still matter for the final standings for the challenge though no?

Daniel Black
– Daniel Black

2025-09-22 20:25:09 +00:00
Commented Sep 22 at 20:25
1

if they want challenges to continue to be good content long after they've "completed", then you'd generally want score sorting. If all we care about is the completion a week later then yea there's still one purpose for it to serve, at that one point in time (despite none of this having any longterm impact on anything/anyone, unlike codegolf)

Kevin B
– Kevin B

2025-09-22 20:34:16 +00:00
Commented Sep 22 at 20:34
That's a very good point that I wasn't considering. People would probably like to be able to see the best submissions for past challenges, maybe the score sorting only becomes available after the challenge has completed.

Daniel Black
– Daniel Black

2025-09-23 14:08:00 +00:00
Commented Sep 23 at 14:08

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Jean-Francois T. · Accepted Answer · 2025-10-09 03:41:20Z

3

Would it be a strange idea to enable posting pictures in our answers?

It would be useful for model-based languages (e.g. see this answer of one challenge: https://stackoverflow.com/beta/challenges/79767716/79778922 ).

edited Oct 9 at 3:41

answered Sep 30 at 3:40

Jean-Francois T.

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Violet Rosenzweig · Accepted Answer · 2025-10-02 19:45:40Z

0

Would love for the code highlighting to show properly. It makes it more difficult to read other's answers.

answered Oct 2 at 19:45

Violet Rosenzweig

81044 silver badges77 bronze badges

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Peter Dongan · Accepted Answer · 2025-10-11 10:38:55Z

0

I think there should be an option to hide submissions until the challenge is closed.

Challenge 11 involves finding a single correct solution. I noticed that a few people have openly or quietly edited their submissions since seeing the answer.

answered 2 days ago

Peter Dongan

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Heretic Monkey · Accepted Answer · 2025-10-04 21:47:55Z

-3

Recently tried the Stack Overflow challenge and I found a workaround to view the entries of a challenge without solving the challenge. Most people would be aware of this as well as the moderator but since I can't verify it so therefore in order put light on the matter I am saying here.

The way is: To enter any random 30 letter to view the solution and then based on the entries of the solution I can enhance my solution.

In order to test, I did it in the following answer https://stackoverflow.com/beta/challenges/79766578/79771808

edited Oct 4 at 21:47

Heretic Monkey

12.1k55 gold badges4949 silver badges7070 bronze badges

answered Sep 22 at 15:50

Faraaz Kurawle

1,20022 gold badges66 silver badges1010 bronze badges

4

I can't seem to see any answers by simply entering text into the answer box, do you mean that you submitted a nonsense answer to see the other answers? I don't know how much we really need to worry about that, there are plenty of other ways to "cheat" if you really want to.

DBS
– DBS

2025-09-23 12:49:51 +00:00
Commented Sep 23 at 12:49
1

@DBS , i agree.

Faraaz Kurawle
– Faraaz Kurawle

2025-09-23 15:19:29 +00:00
Commented Sep 23 at 15:19

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yivi · Accepted Answer · 2025-09-23 09:22:49Z

-4

I still don't know why this is on SO at all when codegolf SE exists, except for the obvious reason that it gets more views and clicks here than elsewhere... not that it matters, extra ad impressions from this probably don't come close to whatever SE invested into it, and if it's instead meant to mend community relations or attract new expert users, this is not going to make a dent either.

The following paragraph is now outdated as the mentioned appropriate avatar has been replaced by a picture of a teacup (at least I hope it's tea and not coffee, because promoting hard drugs such as caffeine is bad, mkay)

But looking at the challenges posted in the last week, at least SE seems to fully understand the value they provide to SO, which makes me cautiously optimistic (about their eventual removal). If you are not convinced that is the case, simply look at the avatar of the staff member posting the challenges - that image is IMO a great way to "sign off" each post, and also serves as a good summary of the existing challeges. Maybe it should be featured in a larger size elsewhere on the challenges page as well.

edited Sep 23 at 9:22

yivi

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answered Sep 22 at 10:42

l4mpi

5,14655 gold badges4545 silver badges5858 bronze badges

6

Not sure why you felt the need to mention the profile pic specific staff member posting the challenges. I understand that it was a poop emoji at the time of this answer, but specifically calling them out about that seems a bit unnecessary. It also doesn't really speak to your point that SE seems to understand the value they provide, SE has nothing to do with the profile picture the staff member chose.

Daniel Black
– Daniel Black

2025-09-22 20:23:42 +00:00
Commented Sep 22 at 20:23
@DanielBlack the "whoosh" you're hearing is the sound of the joke flying over your head. I chose this tongue-in-cheek way of expressing my sentiment about this feature, as using clearer words would probably lead to this answer being deleted and/or my account suspended.

l4mpi
– l4mpi

2025-09-23 07:58:37 +00:00
Commented Sep 23 at 7:58
@yivi please don't edit out the last paragraph, it is no longer applicable due to changed facts but is still relevant for context. You don't delete bug tickets in jira after they have been fixed either, right? If you object to the strike-through feel free to change the formatting.

l4mpi
– l4mpi

2025-09-23 08:57:47 +00:00
Commented Sep 23 at 8:57
4

This is not a jira ticket. Want to add relevant text? Do so, properly.

yivi
– yivi

2025-09-23 09:02:41 +00:00
Commented Sep 23 at 9:02
1

@yivi that was an analogy to say, please don't remove information just because it was superseeded by changed facts. I removed the strikethrough, now please stop vandalizing my post.

l4mpi
– l4mpi

2025-09-23 09:13:55 +00:00
Commented Sep 23 at 9:13
2

@l4mpi: The best way to remove the outdated information would be to simply... remove it. Not to strike it out and leave an edit note in the text explaining why it's struck out. Instead, just remove it and explain why in the edit note.

V2Blast
– V2Blast StaffMod

2025-09-23 20:52:53 +00:00
Commented Sep 23 at 20:52
@V2Blast again, information shouldn't be removed because the situation changed. Especially not in a meta post - for example, removing meta posts about the monica situation because that reached a legal settlement would not be appropriate, but adding a note that the situation is no longer ongoing can be. Using strikethrough to visually mark information as no longer applicable is a common thing on the internet, apparently not well received by some here - and I can understand objections to that formatting, but the correct resolution would be to change the formatting, not remove the paragraph.

l4mpi
– l4mpi

2025-09-24 07:45:46 +00:00
Commented Sep 24 at 7:45
2

Honestly, I think Challenges is a better fit for SO than CGSE. Out of the 9 challenges posted so far, only 3 would be well-received on Code Golf (and that's after modifications to ensure the challenges meet CGSE standards). CGSE is vastly more competitive than Challenges, so a place to have more "creative" coding challenges/showcases isn't that bad an idea. It would be nice to have a shoutout to Code Golf somewhere in Challenges, but fundamentally, I think there's enough of a difference in challenge scope and answer expectations to justify two different platforms.

lyxal
– lyxal

2025-09-26 12:39:30 +00:00
Commented Sep 26 at 12:39

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