How about a mini-forum thing similar to the code of the day at flipcode... however the idea is that someone posts an initial problem or piece of code and then people reply with improved versions of that code, repeat recursively.
Then you have a kind of votable ranking system for the posts so that people can then see what was "the best" version.
It would act as both a way go get help with problems, and also an ongoing mini-challenge for programmers.
Sounds like it's something that can be done already with this forum (without voting unfortunately - although I can add that later, I think.. do you really need voting? ) - it sounds like a good side activity for programmers, like the speed paint is for modellers. Who gets to submit the problem code?
anyone would be allowed to submit a problem...
however the voting is very usefull as in an ideal situation there will be many different versions. It would make it alot more useful if people could rate them so the "best" versions would be most visible. So that people could see the version that was considered the most optimal/feature rich/however you rate code goodness.
I've never looked it up, but do we have some kind of c/c++ syntax hilighting on forum posts? cause that would be very cool too.
yeh, not a bad idea fixing problems is also easier and less time consuming than making a demo. But i wonder how many people would use it, most people are working on projects were they cant share any information or code on.