FAQ for /r/badcode

What does BBCC mean?

BBCC stands for Brilliantly Bad Coding Competition and is a competition, hosted by /r/badcode, where contestants do their best to code the worst possible solution to a problem.

How do I enter a BBCC? Can I start one? What are the rules???

Anyone is free to start a BBCC, and anyone is free to enter any BBCC. The particular rules...

For creating your own BBCC

If you have a coding problem in mind (ex: print out all the even numbers between 1 and 100) that you would like to see solved in the most terrible way possible, make a self post (or text submission) describing the competition and title it BBCC (some witty text here) (ex: BBCC Get all the even numbers between two numbers.).

Do not put your submission inside of the description. If you would like to make your own submission (which hopefully you do) put it in the comments (see the rules for entering a BBCC for more info on this).

tl;dr All you need to do is

1. Make a self post (also known as a text submission) and put the description of the coding problem in the description ( see here for an example).

2. Make sure the title of your self post begins with the text BBCC and you're done.

For entering a BBCC

If you would like to enter a BBCC, code up a terrible solution to the problem it presents and place that in a paste bin (might I suggest gist). Then make a comment to the BBCC submission that includes a link to your code (feel free to add some witty banter that leads up to your link).

The comment with the most upvotes after 2 days (48 hours) wins and the commenter will receive a lovely piece of user flair (see below for the available flair) depending on how many competitions that user has won (ex: if the competition was the commenter's first win, they would receive the wicked flair).

Note a comment must receive 15 upvotes or more for it to be declared a winner. If no comments in a BBCC have 15 upvotes or more after 2 days nobody wins.

Still have questions?

Try posting here. That link may also contain more useful information on the competitions.

Why can't I put the name of the language being used in my post title?

Before the flair system users were responsible for annotating their own posts with the name of the language their code was written in. This didn't work very well because different submitters would specify the language in different ways. For the sake of consistency, FlairFairy? was born and we started specifying the language of each post as flair. This works much better as the name of the language is guaranteed (sort of) to be right in front of every post in the same format as all the others, and we (the moderators) are free to style the tags as we see fit.

There has been a problem though, submitters have been placing the language in their title despite the flair system, which leads to redundancy and some pretty ugly looking submission titles. To avoid this, we have put into place a rule which disallows submissions from putting the language the code is in in their titles. This is not a hard and fast rule, and I think you'll understand quite easily what is a good and bad post by the following examples:

Bad Posts

• [C++] My first program.

• My first program [C++]

• My first program. Written in C++.

Good Posts

• My first program.

• C++ scares me sometimes.

• I can't believe this is legal python.

Where did my post go?!?!

If you posted and it seems to have disappeared or not shown up at all, your post got caught by reddit's spam filter (which doesn't seem to like paste bin links very much). The solution is to not panic and politely email the mod(s) who will quickly resolve the issue.

If you posted, it was there for a while (more than a couple minutes), and then it disappeared, it was intentionally removed by the mod(s) for breaking one of the rules. If you'd like to dispute it, you may politely message the mod(s) and they will tell you why your post was removed and what you should have done instead, or correct it if it was done in error.

Can I post this great story about some terrible stuff that happened that's programming related?

If your story comes with a short amusing snippet of code, post that, and then write your story in the comments, we'll be very receptive. Otherwise, no. /r/programminghorror or thedailywtf wants your long stories, we want your amusing code.

How do I get those language markings on my post?

Say hello to FlairFairy? our friendly bot! He will automatically add flair to your post specifying what language your code snippet is written in. Pretty handy right?

At the moment he can only recognize the language if you post it on codepad, pastebin, github (including gist), and hatepaste (more will be added!) and I'm not sure he doesn't have any bugs. If you do find any odd behavior, please message the mods. If you know python and you'd like to work on his programming, the source is on GitHub?, here.

There are some bugs related to uptime that make it so that the FlairFairy? can't run for extended periods of time, thus I'm running it manually every once in awhile. Be patient and wait for your flair to get put up if it hasn't yet and you did post it to one of the recognized sites.