I was looking around at my position in standings during systests and I noticed many of the low rated participants had nearly identical code for D2. Examples:
https://mirror.codeforces.com/contest/2002/submission/275809437
https://mirror.codeforces.com/contest/2002/submission/275816397
https://mirror.codeforces.com/contest/2002/submission/275809226
https://mirror.codeforces.com/contest/2002/submission/275826393
It seems like some high rated user leaked solutions of D2 and possibly E as well ([user:NikolaT] who has a clearly plagiarized D2 ac'ed E with weird variable names), and the cheaters have started reaching GM/IM perf.
Not just that, they are also getting the solutions relatively early, one of the cheating groups I know leaked solutions to D as early as 01:16, which together with an E submitted later in the contest would bring people to a top 500 result.
Why is the 01:16 time so important? Well, by that time in the contest, only about 200 to 250 people have solved the problem, so if there is anyone who leaked the solution, it has to be one of these people, which is quite a worrying sign if you think at the perspective of someone frauding their way to GM.
For example Souvik16900121097 is a proven cheater and he got top 400, the same goes for other suspicious users and their solving patterns such as NanoNinja18, Ragnar-Lodbrok, surajchaudharyy, trandinhvo1809 and many other proven cheaters who get solutions from various groups, live streams or who knows what other methods cheaters have nowadays.
Another interesting point is that every time there is a round where Div. 1 participants are rated, way fewer people actually join it, which can be seen with a quick look over the contests page, my theory is that cheaters find it way easier to just get high ratings in lower divisions.
stefdasca I sincere apologies for my recent actions involving cheating. I understand that my behavior was unethical By attempting to gain an unfair advantage of rating.I deeply regret my actions and the impact they may have had on others. I recognize that my behavior was unacceptable and I am taking steps to ensure that it does not happen again. Once again, I apologize for my actions. Thank you :)
Looks like a GPT generated reply.
Worst apology of 2024.
Give us back your rating then, because you caused so many of us to lose so much rating (i personally got an -109) while you went from pupil to expert.
broski I don't think his cheating caused your -109
It’s people like him copying code for A to E that resulted in my ranking decreasing. I did underperform and would’ve gotten a negative delta, but definitely not -109. It’s the fact that so many people cheated that pushed my ranks down by so much. Normally solving 3 questions in a Div 1+2 would be an expert performance, but this time solving 4 questions would’ve gotten you specialist.
And would you look at that, the pupil became expert.
Outside of giving a heartfelt "f*ck you" to your face and not buying your words one bit, I have to commend you for the fact that you even had the mind to write an apology, regardless of how much heart you put into it or how much effort your prompt was, should LLM-assisted apology was the case.
Get good legit next time.
FuyuMai12 stefdasca I Once again apologize to the Codeforces team and all you of enthusiastic competitive programmers for yesterday and promise that this will never happen again in future. I started Competitive programming 1 month ago and i had no idea that could happen by cheating like this. Yesterday a guy messaged me on T*L*G*A* and said give me some money i will give you solution code and i gave $10 to him. I was tempted to get a Expert Tag without hardworking but all you helped me to showing the reality of myself or cheater. for now i am taking a commitment that i will be expert by end of dec 24 with my hardwork and i will make another cf account and will start again i am saying again i was not aware about it. I apologize again once more again for hurting you all. Thank you:)
Excuses only further aggravate the offense committed.
you gotta be kidding
So give your rating to me!
yooo this was hilarious. broski seemed like he just woke up
Bro even cheated in their apology
Oh I found a possible the leaker for that solution, it's Way.To.Cp.01 and his submission is 275791846. After removing the template, we can see submissions such as 275847150, 275847105, 275846902 or 275840014 which used the same code too.
Nice. Do you have any special trick to find these kind of submissions?
I knew the code was quite long so I sorted by submission size to find the original code. After that, I removed the template and estimated the size of the code without one so I just binary searched for the answer in a way :)
Thanks. Interesting :)
what rating must I be to achieve such algorithmic mastery?
Maybe atleast 1900 (without cheating lol)
You don't need rating, only IQ.
xdddd
I would love to see you set a binary search problem with this theme in mind. Totally would participate in. :)
That problem would be really fun.
Respect++ !!
Judging from his performance it's fair to assume that he's at least master, perhaps even GM. Quite scary.
stefdasca here are some more potential cheaters guraj_97 ujjwal8409937761 gjfhj8528 electro-coder Qode_breaker Just see there submission of problems D1 and D2 they are just matching they have tried to add functions and even try to change whole flow of code to remove plagrism.
275846889 275825736 275821846 Just see this submission 275843826 how the person has tried to obstruct the plagrism but it is visible the code is copied. I urge MikeMirzayanov to skip there solutions from this contest and give them strict warning.
I can clearly see in their profile that they have a sharp rating climb(too sharp perhaps). But how do you find out about such people? Is there an algorithm/tool or is it manual?
as it was div 1+2 and many CMs and M also have difficulty in solving D2 and these people solved D2 easily it is not possible and just see there code flow matches so it is easy to catch i have done it manually by seeing newbies and pupil submissions of D2.
How are people getting more rating in lower divisions? I normally avoid Edu rounds and Div 4s because they are more of a speed game and I normally just lose ratings there. Tough rounds = more rating
Assuming you want to do it fairly, you can practice past rounds and focus on getting better at more standard problems, as Div. 3, Div. 4 and to a lesser extent edu rounds have them too. Also, being precise on earlier problems is more important for these rounds as well.
What worse is they are not just Indians mostly but in the Elite Institutions like IIT's and NIT's. Crazy!
lol
Well yes they are elite (wrt India at least) and probably in few decates wrt world as well
most of the high rated coders(gm and igm types) in the country are from these institutions so... :)
Well then why is the median cf user there around high pupil / low specialist (looking at IIT Delhi)?
And why is it that whenever I hear the name IIT on this site, it is almost always in the context of someone cheating?
Whoops, meant to reply to love_in_CP
Most of the users from India do cp just for the sake of interviews and leave it as soon as they get job that means people here don't do cp as a hobby but to get a good job offer
I still wouldn't expect this sort of performance and behavior out of students attending elite colleges (and doing the most competitive major, no less). But I think it makes more sense when we consider a few things:
India has an average IQ of 82.
JEE isn't a great test of problem-solving ability. Let's say it has an r = .5 correlation with IQ.
Now, in any given year, there should be around 10 million or so Indians who are at the JEE-taking age. Of course, not all of these people take the JEE, but we can expect that the absolute best of the best will take the JEE. Now let's say that these elite institutions pick the top 2k JEE test takers for CS. So the average CS major at these schools is 1/10000 in terms of JEE performance. This is roughly a score of 156 on a scale with mean 100 and sd 15. To make adjustments for regression to the mean, however, we might expect that the average JEE CS major has an IQ of 56 * .5 + 100 = 128. Since India has an average IQ of 82 (and let's assume an sd of 15), we might expect the average IQ of JEE CS majors to be around 128 — 18 = 110 when compared with western countries. Say what you want, but I think that this IQ is very in line with their performance.
lets just get rid of rating and replace it with iq test. this way there can be no cheaters too. iq iq iq iq iq iq iq
lol, so much research just to demean a country based on it's iq, chill out dude :)
When did I demean India? I only demeaned the IITs.
You're only half right. Let me break it down for you deeper.
Average of India includes many not well educated people from previous generations and many people who didn't complete school. Just see the literacy rate of India from independence till today. Average IQ of a person giving JEE will be 95-100 in my opinion. Also, average IQ is not calculated in proper way for many of the developing nations.
People from IITs who do coding in Codeforces aren't only from CS-related branches. Many from core branches do CP too. This is because most of the core branch graduates end up in Software or Management. Even Google CEO Sundar Pichai is from Metallurgy not CS related branch.
India has special reservation for lower castes, economically weaker sections, and girls(yes, girls since cracking JEE is harder for girls unlike medicine, Govt Service exams etc). So many of those you see here aren't top 2k rank people. Many CS IIT grads don't do much CP as there is good amount of workload in IITs.
This is becoming seriously concerning
Another one : https://mirror.codeforces.com/contest/2002/submission/275835970
Another one : https://mirror.codeforces.com/contest/2002/submission/275828288
275843826 see this one how finely he tried to obstruct the code.
275821846 this also
Came here before every cheater and their mother are going to tell you that: "Guys, it's alright, let's not focus on the cheaters, just get better lol!!11!"
Because, who cares, you would only need a performance equivalent of a top <1% of all rated participants on codeforces to beat them!
Guys, it's alright, let's not focus on the cheaters, just get better lol!!11!
cheaters are not the reason you are blue
Yeah the main reason being that
problemsetters on cf are noobsI'm really bad at competitive programming?Like, what is your point even? Kick an expert when he's down? Please tell me something that I don't know on why I haven't crossed 1900 barrier yet.
Cheaters are not (yet) the reason why you are still yellow. How do you like that one, huh?
Probably just not enough problems solved / practice.
This blog (https://mirror.codeforces.com/blog/entry/132453) allows you to plot rating against problems solved. Based on its website, your progress seems to match mine almost identically from problems solved vs rating: https://codeforcesplot-app-5def7a85c434.herokuapp.com/getprofile?username=lookcook&username2=electric_boogaloo&minrating=
The graphs are nice and all, but CF isn't the only way to practice (for example, I have about 240 solved problems on CSES). Besides, graphs will rarely tell the full picture. Out of curiosity, do you have any math/physics/computing olympiad experience/background? I for sure don't have any.
UPD: You do realize that in this Div. 1 + 2 you got literally lapped by some random newbies and pupils? All I wanted to convey in my original comment was that people shouldn't turn a blind eye to other people blatantly cheating and copy pasting solutions, and not be led astray by "just get better" comments.
I did not have any olympiad experience before starting competitive programming. I started participating in computing olympiads around the same time as starting competitive programming.
Practice seems to correspond with rating (though it is true some people improve much faster than us yes).
Cheaters should be punished. But he is right
Also- 1) I'm bad at guessing 2) I am slow, at least comparing others my level, My div2 A, B, C solutions take longer than most people at my level, even slower than many experts 3) I also don't have a GM/non-GN friend to leak solutions to me
And I still got to 2000+. You need to get better at solving high difficulty problems, i.e: 1900-2200
Okay boss
Well if 450+ contestants from top 1800 get skipped. (I say the above after comparing my rank just after contest, vs that after submissions are skipped).
I would certainly disagree with your statement ("Cheaters are not the reason you are blue").
If it goes on like this and you give contests consistently (and people become capable enough to understand the solutions they are copying and alter them).
You might also reach cyan. And get stuck at it.
It is kind of like the thing where not knowing a particular data structure hampers your confidence even if you are not going to need it.
Segment trees
I feel like you're presenting a false binary here. Yeah, the cheaters are probably only a small minority of the contestant pool and don't explain a 300 rating difference, but they certainly have some impact, which is (as the blog presents) far larger than what we previously believed.
Lately I've started to notice that we have one camp that copes with their stagnant rating by scapegoating cheaters, and another that copes with the gradual erosion of contest integrity on Codeforces by covering their ears and downplaying any issues that come up.
I think cheating is bad and cheaters should be punished. Idk why cf just skips the solutions for one contest instead of permabanning the user. Yes, it seems more prevalent nowadays.
But it's still funny when people claim it has anything but a negligible impact on their rating.
I'm not so sure about the negligible part anymore. I was talking to oursaco and he claims that 50+ of the ~740 people above him in this combined round showed signs of plagiarism like presented in the blog. And, as you acknowledge, it's getting worse.
While I agree that "just solve problems, ignore the cheaters" is absolutely more productive for the individual (and more in line with what I do as well), the extra attention being brought to the issue is better for the platform in the long run. I just don't think there's good reason to dunk on struggling cfers for benign comments like above.
I don't know if people realize this or not, but here's what CF contests turn into because of people teaming up, sharing the code etc.:
Only ways to deal with this as a single contestant are:
Does it sounds like cheating makes CP more fun? Absolutely not, given all the additional mental preparation you have to do to minimize the impact of cheaters on you.
You are overestimating the impact of cheaters on your performance. The only reason it has made so hard for you to enjoy CP is because you have allowed it to become such a big deal to yourself. Focus more on practicing solving actual good problems. If what is shown in your profile is all you have practiced, then you haven't nearly tried hard enough to complain about anything
Bruh what are you talking about? In this round there were at least 2000 cheaters. Newbies, pupils and specialists were solving ABCD1D2, while some CMs and Masters struggled even with D1.
That's one round, how many rounds do you get 2000 cheaters on? Your being stuck in expert/specialist/pupil isn’t because of cheaters cheating in contest
Why the quantity of cheaters is expected to fall down???
I am not expecting it to fall down. This sounds like an anomaly towards me. Because it happened with this contest, it doesn’t mean it is to happen every time. Ofc, actions need to be taken so it doesn’t become normalized
What, do you think these 2000 people will suddenly disappear?
Yeah, probably, if those 2000 people appeared out of nowhere, they might disappear out of nowhere!
Why do we suddenly have 2000 cheaters? Without knowing the proper context, it's naive to assume that 2000 people are going to cheat every round. If the solution to a problem is being leaked by some livestream/blog/youtube video, and mass people have access to it. People are going to cheat, specially when they see everyone else doing so. There's certainly a problem, but the problem is not 2,000 people cheating, it's mass people having access to cheating.
We know that there are thousands of cheaters in the cheating groups, in the most advanced ones. What we see is a rare instance when plagiarism check actually worked quite well(basically detected vulnurability in their code which is with modern ways of hiding it is very unlikely). Since we know that such groups have had quite a big audience for several years now, it's safe to assume that these 2000 cheaters have existed long before the round, they didn't come out of nowhere. Just take a glimpse at their accs, most of them were registered 6 months — year ago. I'm sorry, but the idea of 2000 cheaters spawning simultaneously is just a bit rididculous.
Ans assuming that they'll continue cheating isn't naive — it's common sense: there is actually nothing that'll stop them from cheating(I'm talking about the ability to create a ton of different accs) and they obviously haven't achieved their goal cause they got caught — as a result there is no reason for them to stop whatsoever.
If most of them have registered 6 months — years ago, and they have been cheating for all this long, it makes less sense that they would be stuck into ranks like pupil/specialist for this long. Furthermore, cheaters usually stop taking part in contests once they achieve a certain rating threshold, usually expert. Thousands of cheaters in the cheating groups are not necessarily active contestants, most of them probably left CP after they achieved their threshold level. Of course, 2000 cheaters didn't just spawn randomly out of nowhere. But to understand why we see a sudden cheating surge, we first need to know the exact context behind it. I have heard that the solutions were leaked by some livestream video or blog or something. If that is the case, then this sudden rise is actually not surprising.
We are talking about 2000 people here pal, real people, not 2000 accs. They migh've easily created 10-20 accs throughout their cp 'career' abandoning old accs once they got caught. Migh as well explain why only a small percenatage of all cf accs are active.
https://youtu.be/ceaD4EtbNMM?si=GVJFckcCMyTTbIZy
This video supposedly leaked the solution for D2, It was leaked around last 15-20 minutes, around that time D2 got a surge of submissions. That explains why do we suddenly see so many cheaters
ok
International Master with cheating :skull:? idk. If someone reaches Master level by cheating, it would be a bad sign in interviews if they can’t solve some med/high problems. What’s the benefit of wasting 3 hours like that? Most of the interviews I’ve been through focused on tracking my chain of thoughts, no one even cared where I competed or what rank I achieved.
Noone would reach Master/IM by chea... oh wait
Interesting..
Unless they are a little psychotic
It used to be that if you were blue or higher you could avoid the scourge of the cheaters and rank above them, but it seems those days are gone.
This is really unfortunate and I don't see a great solution long-term.
I thought the same, but today I saw a cyan surge up in my friends leader board. I kind of know he often indulges in unfair practices. He solved up to D2. (Which as far as I know seems highly unlikely).
this also affects problem rating since rating of problem determined by rating of participants who solved problem.
Yep, clist shows 1774 for D1 which is way off
saw random experts specialists and pupils in the ranking page and felt sad to miss the contest, only to realize that most such cases were indians and all had same sol for E ;(
Although this time E was solvable for specs, a really fun contest. Previous one (cry/orz gang) wasn't like that at all!! Felt more like a Div 2.
Still, comparing E to F amount of solutions, speedforces:tm: ...and there ARE a lot of cheaters in submissions!
That mf cheated A, B, C, D1, D2:
https://mirror.codeforces.com/contest/2002/submission/275830814
okandil21's sol: https://mirror.codeforces.com/contest/2002/submission/275839881
sol from this blog: https://mirror.codeforces.com/contest/2002/submission/275809226
Yet another one
from Nestor...: https://mirror.codeforces.com/contest/2002/submission/275840014
Another many (potentially).... I spent less than 10 minutes searching.
They all seem to have the same form, with different variable names and extra functions to cover it up.
https://mirror.codeforces.com/contest/2002/submission/275805177
https://mirror.codeforces.com/contest/2002/submission/275799849
https://mirror.codeforces.com/contest/2002/submission/275804003
https://mirror.codeforces.com/contest/2002/submission/275802236
https://mirror.codeforces.com/contest/2002/submission/275809753
https://mirror.codeforces.com/contest/2002/submission/275811467
https://mirror.codeforces.com/contest/2002/submission/275813640
https://mirror.codeforces.com/contest/2002/submission/275813916
https://mirror.codeforces.com/contest/2002/submission/275820900
https://mirror.codeforces.com/contest/2002/submission/275816311
https://mirror.codeforces.com/contest/2002/submission/275815586
orz
And even more:
thepriyansh01: 275769949
Sanskar_Sharma: 275829079 (Guy used GPT to translate a known cheat D solution to Python then did it to Java for D2)
-Paw-: 275831601
Shubhranil: 275831306
There's so many of them, they're like a plague. Almost all pupils and newbies who ranked above 2000 cheated.
orz
How do you manage to solve E in the last contest..?
and one more thing, with just 3 contest,you have become a pupil..!!! How Sir..?
Are you one of those cheaters?
I have seen one international master changing language abruptly in today's contest for C question. It came into my sight as it was C questions and that person took 1 hr to solve and that to he submitted in language which he has not used many times. I am his big fan so, I dont want to name him but is it common activity to do so? bcz he has not used this language for submitting codes ?
If it is not so common pls reply to this comment and i will reveal him. I dont want to name someone whom I admire without prior knowledge of things.
https://mirror.codeforces.com/contest/2002/submission/275822989
same code..
Why cf is not performing a rollback in rollback i guess they can be caught i think. In previous rollbacks many cheaters got caught.
Just become tourist to be not affected by cheaters.
Tourist didn't participate in the round 4Head
There is also a list of cheaters in this blog https://mirror.codeforces.com/blog/entry/132571
Recently I've lost contact to a friend who've been trained CF contest with me because I called him out for being a cheater... But then after all these cheating rampant blog, I think I've moved on.
[deleted]
aren't doing everything useless? He could simply jump to another alt and come back, all anonymously. More importantly, he's making a profit. We simply couldn't stop him.
I've just checked standings and my place went from 1523 to 1149 lol
Edit: it's 1095 now and as crazy as it sounds, almost 50% of D2 solutions were skipped imao
Another interesting fact is that the number of solves on E > D2.
This matches my feeling during the contest when I stucked on D2 for more than 1 hour before I skipped it and found E is an obvious leetcode-style monotonic queue but left no time to finish coding.
I kept checking the standings seeing 1k+ solves and was like come on 1k+ ppl solved this it must be an simple one easier than E. If I was able to see how many honest participants skipped D2, same as the standings showing now after plagiarism checks, I would have skipped way earlier and got a much better placement just like in Codeforces Round 963 (Div. 2). Cheaters do have non-negligible impact on my contest performance by providing biased estimation on problem difficulties. The impact is as huge as blue to yellow.
Does the above excuse explain a 300 rating difference?
Yes just get better at skipping problems. Yes and yes just get better to be able to guess through problems like D2.
You can say cheaters are the best at problem skipping)
Codeforces could consider creating an official blog post after each contest, where participants can report links or share the code of suspected cheaters. This would help streamline the process and assist Codeforces in identifying and addressing unfair practices. Additionally, Codeforces should take action against cheating-related YouTube channels and Telegram groups to maintain the integrity of the platform.
This is a list of cheaters from the last Div4 round. All of them copied solutions and solved all problems in just a few minutes. Some of them even used ChatGPT.
Additionally, TonyWasHere was skipped in the last Round. If you look at his previous rounds (Like this contest that he solves all problems he got in 15 minutes), you'll notice something seems wrong.
After seeing this contest and the time difference between his submissions I think that this is a shared account
MikeMirzayanov
I was late to the contest and didn’t solve all the problems in just a few minutes. Some of the problems were solved at the same time because I accidentally submitted the wrong file or missed a header file (even though it ran successfully locally). How could I have made such a mistake if I were using ChatGPT or a shared account?
As much as I know this is impossible given the troubles and privacy issues this will bring, I really really want Codeforces to implement the equivalent of KYC.
KYC = Know Your Customer, in this case meaning a user must verify their real-world identity using their government-issued ID in order to participate in contests and be rated.
KYC stands for Kill Your Customer. It's disgusting and evil and it needs to be STOPPED before any more home invasion murders happen because of another "oops our new IT recruit got phished" leak.
We aren't customers. Out of principle, I don't want to give sites more personal info than absolutely necessary, and this isn't absolutely necessary. Instead of cheating prevention, it's a good way to push away people who don't cheat.
Actually verifying personal info requires checking against databases (building your own DB) or having very good anti-spoofing protections to avoid "just submit fake documents" strategy. It also requires manual checking for any unclear cases that crop up. Software that handles all that isn't cheap.
Without a database of basically government data, it's always possible to pass with enough photoshop effort.
I work with this stuff. Customers that go for what you suggest are on the scale of banks, big corporations (Uber comes to mind) or government agencies. They're worried about the kind of attacks that'd allow cheaters to pass. We have pretty strong protections, but they're not perfect and mostly rely on attackers being lazy or dumb. Once in a while, someone will pass. If someone tries a lot with different types of documents, VPNs to avoid IP bans etc, they will make a few fake accounts. Worse yet, you've made fake accounts valuable for cheaters, so they're going to be sold — main reason why people try to open fake bank accounts isn't for themselves, but for other criminals, since it's safer.
TL;DR it won't work and/or it costs too much.
Something like gov-ID might be too intrusive. But something like edu/work email verification or referral from existing users might help preventing cheaters from arbitrarily creating accounts. Hopefully the frustration of such ways would be less than the one from cheaters.
Its fascinating that now purple and masters are also affected by cheating. People who are less than 1600 are complaining for a year about cheating. Many of the high rated coders suggested them to increase their ability to solve more problems so that they can beat cheaters. Now do you see? at what level they have reached?
Please, I request codeforces authority to take some serious actions. You guys are so genius and there must be some way to prevent this massive cheating.
crazy amount of people got skipped, I jumped like 600 ranks
Just checked to see my ranking risen from 641 to 576. Wow. Wow.
~#600 should be a rank usually occupied by high-end M and/or interim/candidate IM, and what's this?
Dude, if you wanna land a job, why going this far? I swear if I got a chance to interview an M/IM I'd definitely throw some complex CP topics into the mix to break their pentimento.
My ratings were under the latest rating rollback, and oh dear, was it wild...
I suddenly got a new rating peak while doing nothing. $$$+15$$$ after cheater exclusion (and that was after a previous $$$+8$$$) is wild.
I found another cheater, he obfuscated his code using random useless variables but its very similar to the leaked solution 275821239 mncuchiinhuttt
I'm more interested in why cheaters are cheating? What is the root cause here? Because all that effort is clearly not worth some imaginary points. Are there some companies that hire based on codeforces rating? Even then it makes no sense: usually companies like Meta/Google can contact you based on gcj\fhc results (at least they did several years ago), but you still need to pass like 2-3 coding rounds, 2 designs, behav and not get stuck in team matching limbo.
tbh,now no one even shortlists based on cf rating,and people are living in a bubble world that dsa/cp ==>good jobs, infact 90% times good jobs is through college->cgpa/gpa.Everyone cheats in OA's if they are online..again I dont see any reason to cheat atleast on these platforms.Ig it is because of few success stories and the bubble created because of youtubers
I still dont get it,why codeforces doesn't implement user verficiation with mobile no's.That way it would relatively hard to keep on making new id's.
There are relatively easy ways to bypass that.
may I know how?even if they make 4 accounts...still(someone who leaks solution wont be able to create new id..atleast there will be much more nuisance to do so)
There are temporary phone number providers online.
Dangg that's new...
So someone could become a GM or IM, which is in the top 1% of users, just from cheating? That's just sad.
couldcan Psychotic_DAfter cheaters had been skipped,My rank from 2592 jump to 2013,How crazy they are!!!
They are cheaters they can do any question
See #4, #5, #6 in the official list of Div3 from yesterday:
276286062 276283663 276290958
276277048 276273889 276281919
The cheating is getting out of control, becoming too widespread, and taking the fun out of participating in these contests. Anyone found cheating should not just be skipped for that contest but be life banned from this platform. If that is too harsh, at the very least, put their rating to 0, and let them start again. The current system is too lenient and encourages cheating.
Every time I visit Codeforces now, there are always some cheaters threads in recent actions.
We all know cheaters do it because of ratings. They want to reach maximum possible rating to show their profile to employers.
There is a simple solution. Why can't we set every cheater's score in every contest they cheat, to a negative infinity, and calculate ratings? Don't exclude them from standings, just put them to the bottom of ranklist by force. They'll lose 200-250 points. This way, they can never get high ratings. Cheating will become pointless.
Why are confirmed cheaters not hardware banned, it would almost completely eliminate cheating. I am not an expert though so I do not know how hard is to implement that.
Guys I found a youtube Channel Named "Sharabi Lal" this youtube channel always goes live during contests and leaks the solutions in a drive. and whats worse is he is selling the higher rated problems in a telegram channel. Please lets report this guy's youtube channel.