The Abbey is slowly crumbling

So what is causing all this??? A monolithic obelisk? Someone got at the server with a tin-opener?? Perhaps the server is running in Chernoble and radiation is slowly destroying the data storage?? or...???

.... and the problem now is, since I cannot trust the site, I cannot be sure that answers I think are perfectly reasonable but are rejected by the server are in fact correct, even if they are (as I suspect) wrong.

Perhaps the answer files have been messed with or the questions, how would I know?

I think I will leave for a while and check every so often to see if any remedial work has been done.

Hi Friends!

I'm sorry, but this is less or more correct. There is a little of unrelated troubles which mainly arose from the single general fact: that when I've started creating this site, I have not been clever enough to make it robust enough - so sooner or later some things went wrong and not everything could be easily fixed. And chores to maintain the stuff heaped bit too heavy on me... not enough hours, not enough hands... Along with cheaters and smart guys posting solutions at github it hurled me into frustration, so I switched to some other projects (but mainly local)... That's how it happens :)

Currently I'm mainly limit support to paing fees for the hosting and domain name... And lazily thinking of using this experience when creating another, improved version, which should also allow opensource participation etc... I hope this will come to existence sooner or later.

About troubles you've mentioned - they are due to using 3-rd party servers which ceased to work... You see, the idea was to make server running cheaply enough so it won't ever go down completely due to financial reasons. But this way has some disadvantages...

Interactive problems stopped working due to fact that they were using separate server (provided by sourceforge). Probably there was some abuse of this functionality or something like this - some day they deleted the account... Perhaps there should be some other way.

Images - at some point I thought it will speed up the service if they are stored at postimage.com - and well... Some day this server went off, then on, then off again... I'll try to see if I can find these images in webarchives and upload them somewhere else...

Sorry, dear Friends, I'm thankful for your devotedness - and I hope I'll be able to repay you one day for your patience!

P.S. good news are we've got some HTTPS support now. I hope nothing is broken after this.

P.P.S. About this:

and the problem now is, since I cannot trust the site, I cannot be sure that answers I think are perfectly reasonable

Answer checkers are working along with core of the site so they hopefully won't go wrong that soon. There were certain number of bugs in problems (and one or two are not resolved completely) - but most of them were found in the first weeks after problems being published (too hastily)...

Hi Rodion, it's nice to know nothing "serious" happened to you.

Dear Graeme, Hi!

Thanks for your kind words :) Nothing serious, though leaving the site on its own is a kind of "serios" too :(

I suspect you (and some other people) may tried to reach me via email, but it got slightly chocked with spam so I'm very sorry for failing to respond...

I have a few news about some small fixes:

• I've really found the way to fetch images from old snapshots of web archive, so now I'm just iterating through the list of pages, move images to github and replace links... this will take some time, but thanks for telling of this!
• I've found that in https version some javascripts are blocked in the problems which have some interactive demos so I'm going to find them one by one in the same manner and fix too... sorry for inconvenience.

As about interactive problems - I hope I'll find some reliable way to revive them, but still breaking my brain on this.

Dear Johnny - thanks for your encouraging words too :) I myself sometimes wonder finding certain curious tasks here. I hope it is not dementia yet :)

Hi, I would like to add my voice to how great a resource this site is. I'm sure new coders are discovering it all the time and finding it of great value, and old folks like me get to play.

A lot of people (myself included) owe you a debt of thanks for all the work it took to put it together.

Good news about the reliability of the checker.

While the author of this site is here, I just wanted to make a quick comment to say thank you for all the resources on this site.

This site was one of the main motivations for me to start coding, and I am now using Python in my day-to-day life.

Cheers!

I'd like to add my thanks as well. I was recently "voluntold" to to become a C# developer and this site has put me miles ahead of where I thought I would be. Thank you!

Hi Friends! Thank you all for your kind words. Surely this inspires :)

To johnnycake, blue_meeny, JimmyCarlos - if it is possible, please write your names either here or in profile pages - for I'm making an attempt to continue certification process here and you seem to be far over even the new threshold!

To Agonnazar: thanks for sharing your story - this is a funny workd "voluntold" - if not a secret, how have it happened? :) I hope to start adding quizzes on languages - hopefully this may be helpful for people who need to deepen knowledge of some specific programming language.

Thank you for what you have made :)

I have only started trying to learn programming properly recently, but this site, I have found, has been the best exercise resource for me for a few reasons.

1. Layout is clean and simple
2. all languages are supported - meaning that focus is more about core programming values then silly memorising tasks from my uni course (that I hated)
3. Re-using my own code over multiple exercises really pushes me to prun and optimiise my code, after all, I will be using it for many hours to come so I want to make sure its perfect!

A great big thank you to Rodion! Hopefully you will see me with a certificate one day :)