Slightly unpleasant news about run code on server feature

Friends, Hi!

If though it may seem there were no many news about openabbey recently - the work is, well, crawling :) Just most of the latest changes were not very obvious. I learnt how to add https, struggled with google webmaster for proper pages indexes, added ability to switch programming language and another to show "explanations" after the task is solved.

Yesterday I was trying to remember how Hackerrank API is used to run code "on server". I don't know how many people use this feature, but for small problems at least it should be convenient.

And I suddenly found, this API is "deprecated" and was going to be switched off at March of 2018. However it looks like still working... That's good.

Well, it may lead to this another feature become broken in future. There seem to be no easy and free replacement. However unlike 5 years ago I now know it could be potentially replaced with some sandbox using Docker, though we'll need another small server instance to run it, I suspect.

So please be not alarmed if you find one day this feature stops working. And if anyone wants to investigate this idea with docker (e.g. play with various docker images found at Docker Hub, try adding some bash commands to compile and run code - at last creating some kind of automated runner which we can use) just tell :) I also will try experimenting with this, but probably bit later. Supposedly this will allow us to have more interesting "challenges" in the future!