Challenges relying on external links
To what extent should a challenge be required to be self contained?
There is a recent challenge Partition Algorithm Trap that involves finding an input that defeats a specified algorithm. Currently the algorithm is provided as an external link to an implementation.
In a similar way, I would like to post King of the Hill contests where the answers compete in a game run by a controller program. I would like to provide this controller program as an external website which reads the code from the answers and plays the game to see who wins.
In both these cases the challenge only makes sense if the external link is working. Should there be a requirement to host required code on Codidact in the challenge itself to protect against any problems with external websites? This would put a limit on the size of code that a challenge can use, since the challenge wording is currently limited to a total of 30,000 characters.
For me personally, this would exclude some of the King of the Hill contests I plan to post, since the challenge specification plus the controller code would not fit in a post.
The options I can think of are:
- Allow links to external resources such as code.
- Increase the maximum character limit of a post.
- Limit all challenges to only what can fit in 30,000 characters with no external links.
I have previously requested increasing the character limit for posts (under Preferred length limit for Code Golf posts), but I'm not sure if this is feasible much beyond 65,000 characters without more significant database changes. I don't know whether there would be challenges that exceed this larger limit.
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