Hi everyone, I know that there are probably too many cheating related blogs on this website by now. But I think that my proposal could actually be useful. I'm assuming that this approach hasn't been discussed before.

First I ask the question as to what motivates people to cheat? I think it is largely because of rating. People want to get a high rating and post it on their CV/Resume. What we can do is deny them this incentive.

Right now, when a user has a skipped submission, their contest is skipped and they are moved to the bottom of the standings and get an appropriate recalculated delta. I think that I have a better solution, which I will describe in the next paragraph.

Let us say user X has a initial rating of 1500. He cheats in a contest and get his rating to say, 1650. We make his rating -1650 after recalculation. In other words, just negate his final rating before rollback. He can then get a rank of a Newbie or any other appropriate title. We can move such users to a separate ranklist. For the next say, 10 contests they participate in, we calculate their delta with respect to other people in that ranklist and not with trusted users. If they give 10 consecutive contests without cheating, we move them back to the original ranklist.

I feel that this could be a nice system since once a cheater has a negative rating, he will probably not participate with that account anymore since he will never get to a positive rating. It's as good as a ban. Also it makes it very unfavourable for users to cheat in general, especially if rating is what they care about.

Any thoughts about this system? Needless to say, please be cordial in the comments.