Блог пользователя dotorya

Автор dotorya, история, 8 лет назад, По-английски

Recently, There seems to be so many multiple accounts among various rating ranges.

In top 10, there is DearMargaret, who became Legendary Grandmaster in 2 months. He should be a great genius, right? There is better hypothesis: He is someone's smurfing account.

Everybody knows that jiry_2 = Syloviaely. He performed quite a long ago, but it's the fact that he has multiple accounts, both having 2900+ ratings.

In Div2 contests, many black-colored people are at top of the scoreboards. Why there are always a lot of talented newcomers? You will know the reason.

Why don't Codeforces ban those multiple accounts? They ruins contest scoreboard and rating system. For example, DearMargaret "absorbed" other participants rating for about 5-6 contests to be Legendary Grandmaster. On those contest's scoreboard, there were always him on top pages.

One account for one person. That was the rule. Smurfing accounts should be banned.

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Auto comment: topic has been updated by dotorya (previous revision, new revision, compare).

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Can you also propose a method to detect fake accounts? I am sure codeforces or any social media website will be happy to implement it if it actually detects fake profiles.

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Is there really a way to prove that for example DearMargaret is smurfing account?

Your explanation seems to be really true but there should be a mechanism for provoing that.

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i think YuukaKazami was banned for having multiple accounts but it was a long time ago. dont know why they stopped doing it.

inb4 posting this from an alt account :/

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Someone needs to calculate if having fake accounts absorb rating offsets people making fake accounts to compete whenever they drop below 1500.

Maybe we can just get rid of the hacky heuristics and add a bunch of fake accounts to the top of the leaderboard to combat rating inflation.

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The ease of making a fake account in the codeforces is very large

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Is there a problem with that ?

Why did you take only DearMargaret as an example ???

Why you didn't mention xumingkuan or jhn333 or another handle that got red in less than 10 contests ???

What if you have an alt too ?

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I BET the least contributor dxymaster2002 is not an alt account.

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I agree with you. I guess it is quite hard to avoid people from making accounts for stupid downvoteable comments, or from creating new accounts if they get desperate by hitting too low rating. However, what I find really disappointing is that such great champions such as Syloviaely and whoever is behind DearMargaret are doing these fake account barbarities. I believe that the top rated people in CF should have a greater understanding of the competitive community and fair contesting, and serve as an example for all the rest of us to honor the rules.

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Why do you only mention Chinese coders? It's discrimination

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Well, in my opinion, the most unforgivable thing is to use an alt account for malicious purposes, for example, posting assulting words or cheating in competitions.
I think it's important to figure out whether the user is using the alt account for bad purposes before you ban it.
Also it's more effective to prevent registering fake accounts than banning them only after you have noticed them.

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At least need to add SMS verification.

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I'm strong agree with you.In my view,it's a kind of cheating.

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Scrolling this thread be like

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In my point of view, the terms of agreement said: "will not use multiple accounts and will take part in the contest using your personal and the single account." So that means we cannot use multiple accounts in the contests only or under any circumstances? I think using 2 or more accs in a contest is unfair, obviously, you can read my blog for the reason. But I don't think having multiple accounts is bad, when participating in contests, it's their own effort and ability.

Moreover, even big social networking sites like Facebook still struggling in getting rid of all fake account , so it would be too hard for Codeforces and does it really worth the effort generating a new complex system?

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It's not ok if you use 2 accounts to apply one contest because it's unfair

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What about a vote?

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Can we have this blog deleted ?

We don't want to see dotorya crying like a kid.... like a baby!

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I think IP test could censor a lot of alt accounts. Of course not all alt accounts can be eliminated, but this will work well enough for there

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Well I think there's nothing much to have more than one account. (But it's better not to do that)(Actually most of the users have.) But, it is really bad to use multiple accounts in one contest. This is really cheating, and should be banned. And another really bad thing is to use fake accounts to say bad words and pollute the environment of the community. This should also be banned.

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wemel is showing us the very reason to ban multiple accounts. Thanks!

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How do you know for sure DearMargaret is an alt account? There are not so many people at this level, and his code does not seem to be same style as anyone else?

I've tried using weaselcrow.com to quickly check, and found that several top rated Chinese cannot be DearMargaret: many of them participated in CF #512, and several other have very different coding style.

As a counter example, when peter50216 first appear on both CF and TC, his rating rise up quite fast, but I believe that is his only account.

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    peter50216 became red in 2012. At that point of time, I do not think that Codeforces was so popular, or at least, much less popular than nowadays. 6 years ago, "someone knows about Codeforces after he becomes very strong" made sense to me. But today, it sounds really weird that someone is in the top of the world, but does not know about one of the biggest competitive programming website in the world.

    Why do you think that DearMargaret is Chinese. May he be someone speaking Chinese, or knowing Chinese but non-Chinese?

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      TC was very popular (probably same as current CF in competitive programming community back then), but peter50216 did not participate in it. AFAIK Peter did hundreds of problems on some Taiwan OJ at that time.

      Anyway this is just an example on top of my head. The main point is that there can be so many reasons one does not participate in CF, e.g. not believing it has much value, prefer training somewhere else, CF rounds are often at inconvenient time, ...

      Of course we don't know 100% DearMargaret is Chinese. I just checked some Chinese because it is the most likely scenario. Maybe someone can do a complete analyze of all top CF users.

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I don't want to see so many alt account in competitions too , but I think some of them are acceptable, and the most important thing is: you need to find out the effective way before you said something aggressive like this.

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My guess (pretty sure about it) : DearMargaret is a account where many people use together. Look at these submissions : 42370798 43314103 42172643 41842544 One can see those coding style is obviously different. I know that this isn't a perfect proof but I believe one people changing style so different in a short time is not logical.

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    Here is another example: 40291873 I think all those submissions are enough evidence to at least have him closely on the watch in the next contests.

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    They look quite similar to me. The biggest difference between them is in parts of code that looks much like library code (Dinic in the code #4) and includes in the code #3 (but the same includes are used in the whole contest, so I guess it was a matter of a template).

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      It's normal for person to follow one code style among submissions. But DearMargaret don't follow any:

      1) different casting to long long in expressions: (i64)pos[a]*w[a] 43324397 vs 1ll * P * N 42172643 vs (long long)rk[u] * (rk[u] - 1) 41847210

      2) different ways to set the size of the global array: const int N = 200000; int x[N]; 42172643 vs char s[123456]; 41829219

      3) different ways to read the elements of an array: scanf("%d", a + i); 42382506 vs scanf("%d", &x[i]); 42172643

      4) different aliases for long long: using ll = long long; 41866839 vs using i64 = long long; 42393047

      Nothing of that is an evidence of cheating. But together it looks notorious.

      P.S.: I think it's important to mention that I didn't found such examples during one contest. So probably we have a shared account for a group of nutella-level users...

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        Items #1 and #3 are quite apparent indeed.

        Problem #2 is harmless to me. If there is just one array, I often initialize it without the const int for the size. The more concerning part is sometimes using the size of a round number 200000 and sometimes 123456.

        I noticed #4 in the above linked codes, but there ll was a part of library code, so I assumed they changed i64 to ll to not alter library code. Your found code isn't the case and is concerning.

        P.S.: I think it's important to mention that I didn't found such examples during one contest. So probably we have a shared account for a group of nutella-level users...

        I agree this can be the case, the submissions within one contest look more similar than between contests.

        I tried going through the list of all 3000+ coders before and eliminating all that had at least one shared contest with DearMargaret. The remaining ones had too much different coding style. But if this is more than one person, we can't eliminate anyone.

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        I think too that Cong, Ling, Dan, Pai and Shang are different people

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          I'm pretty sure that is not the truth. In Chinese CongLing means starting from zero. DanPai means solo and indicates there is only one person behind the account. Shang3k5 means reach 3500 which refers to cf rating. Base on that I think the story behind the fake account is a joke from some LGM guy. It's definitely not funny though.

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            Wow... that clears everything for me. I thought it was supposed to be "cong lingdan pai shang 3k5." and the "pai" part confused me a lot and it even made me think that it could be a non-Chinese-speaking guy trying to use pinyin in their handle but did poorly.

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          "I think too that C,o,d,e and r are different people."

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Seems like making noob alts to compensate for the points taken by legendary alts is the only option we have so far

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why fateice wasn't mention when he became LGM in just 9 contests.

dotorya,you just hate us.

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Alt accounts defending claims against alt accounts. How ironic.

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If you are willing to rewrite the entire rating system, then I'm ok with it. Otherwise no.

The people who reach under 1500 and make booster accounts are helping us fight the scourge of rating deflation. (see https://mirror.codeforces.com/blog/entry/62024)

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(This was in the unrated alts troll thread, so it was deleted together. I think this is an important matter, so I’ll just leave it again here.)

Another problem for multiple accounts: People afraid of downvotes makes an alt account, and writes cancerous stuffs in our community. If you surf through the CF community, you can notice half of the shitposts originating from weird alt accounts.

For community level, I think this can be done — For example, putting a mandatory round participation barrier, or making them wait for 3 days to post something.

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Sticks are not good.

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Well, It's true that I have multiple accounts (jiry_2 = Syloviaely)

The first name of this account is "TakanashiRikka". At that time, I was a beginner and I believed it's interesting to play the role of my favorite anime character on CodeForces, just like she is living in our world, and also a good algorithm competitor. I felt a lot of fun in this process.

As time goes on, my rating became higher and higher, and when I had the chance to become one of Top10 players, I finally realized how unfair it would be if I still kept both of these two high-rating accounts. So I gave up jiry_2 immediately and I only use this account in contests from than on.

I want to apologize for my past behavior and its negative effect, and I can promise that I'm not DearMargaret. I don't want to be the "leader" of multiple accounts (although it's the truth), so I think I have a duty to take a stand, and I can accept the result that jiry_2 is banned :)

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An idea that came recently to my mind is to add the option of "unrated participation" so for example when you register to a contest you could choose if you either want it to be rated for you or not. This can be changed right until the contest starts.

Thus, if you register as rated you just see the usual scoreboard with all rated participants and nothing changes from the current format.

If you register as unrated, you have 2 options: see all rated participants and yourself, or see all participants(rated or unrated) on the scoreboard. All your unrated participations should be private and only you can see them.

This way, people that are afraid to lose rating and make another account won't have the incentive to do it anymore, they can just use the unrated feature to see how well they perform. I realize this is somewhat similar to virtual participation but the difference is that it's all in real time and you get judged on the pretests.

There still remain the people that want to look cool by getting the first place on div2 but there's not many of them.

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There is this 4 years old blog Why do users make multiple accounts?. I think it explains well why many people create fake accounts to participate in div2.

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What is the purpose of this blog? To raise awareness? Seems unnecessary.

It is highly unlikely Mike or anyone would do something. You mentioned infamous jiry_2 = Syloviaely. It is confirmed by himself but both accounts exist. You can remember sorry_dreamoon fame. It was a cool joke but still second account. Analysis by Enchom seems very convincing to me. In case of DearMargaret we don't have even idea of who it might be.

It would be cool to hear comments from him/her but we probably won't. It is true that CP community is small, at least at the top most people know each other from onsites and/or personal conversations. But it can be that he/she is too young to attend onsites. Who knows.

I want to say my opinion on 3 types of fake accounts mention in blog or in comments + 1 of which I know from somewhere else:
1) Fakes to win in div2. I'm not bothered because I'm not in div2 for some years, and when I was in div2 it didn't look strange to me. Some strong guy take his first contest on CF and finished on top. That seems logical, I can relate to that. I placed 2nd in my first SRM, that was my only div2 round on TopCoder. Maybe after this years that changed. CF is probably the most known site in CP so it is unlikely that someone strong not using it. But it still can be the case for some coaches who thinks that you shouldn't do rounds before reaching some level (I would say that to newbie, I think).
2) Fakes to have 2-3-4 nutella accounts. That bother me because I'm not a good person. It is important for me to estimate that I am top-X in the world now. And that kind of fakes interferes. But it is like 20/50/100 people in the world, it would be easier to agree that we shouldn't do that. And also since the number of people who can do that is strictly limited, it is not a wide problem for all community.
3) Fakes to write shitposts. Oh, this is so bad. If you want to write something and think that reaction of community will hurt you, this is a good sign that you just shouldn't write it. But if you want to write it anyway, do it under your own account, that is your bad deed. Obviously this "but" added to whitewash some guy named Um_nik who regularly writes some shit. Also this "but" don't work with rotavirus. I should respect him for writing literally any delirious thing in his mind but I do not.
4) Fakes to overcome fear of rating loss. It is just stupid, rating is just a number.

Oh, there are more kinds!
3') Fakes to write something for which you can lose something real. Example. This using of fakes is OK, but the fact that we have to talk about these situations at all is not OK.
5) Hello, Dniwe_of_river is my fake. It is somewhat funny that Um_nik is registered on my main e-mail which was created before I came up "Um_nik" (like, the name itself), and Dniwe_of_river is registered on e-mail "um.nik[something]@gmail.com". Why did I create it? Well, I and some other person wanted to write a contest together (you can see that half of submits are on Pascal without tabulation (that's me) and the other half on C++). We understood that it is against the rules that is why we created another account which won't affect our ratings. We probably could wait until the round ends and then participate virtually. Shame on us.

Oh, now I understand. You just wanted to share your thoughts with community. That's cool.

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    It is important for me to estimate that I am top-X in the world now.
    rating is just a number.
    Choose one

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      If all of us will get +1000 rating that won't change anything at all, but the number will change drastically. There are some people who tries to increase their ratings without increasing their skill. This includes 'participating from fake when you are not feeling well', 'if I don't solve C (or maybe A) in 15 minutes, I don't submit anything' and many other things. If you do this, you value your rating higher than your real skills. And such rating cannot be used to estimate 'top-X in the world'.

      I think that I want my skill be higher, not the number. So my point is valid: participating from fake to somehow affect (or do not affect in this case) rating on your main account means that you value the number, not the skill. And this is stupid.

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        thanks, got it

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        If all of us will get +1000 rating that won't change anything at all, but the number will change drastically.

        Then base rating is just a number, not relative rating — which is what people usually mean.

        I think that I want my skill be higher, not the number.

        And how do you estimate your skill (relative to other people) if not by rankings and ratings?

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          Suppose that you have a notebook in which you write the amount of money you have every day. You want to have more money but you think that the good estimator is the number in the notebook, so you decide to have bigger number written in notebook. That's so easy, just write a bigger number.

          There are ways to increase your rating (including but not limited to ones I mentioned). I don't want to use these, because I want my rating to represent my skill. So then I could use it to estimate my real skill. But I have to tolerate those who use.

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    Fakes to win in div2. I'm not bothered because I'm not in div2 for some years, and when I was in div2 it didn't look strange to me.

    That's not the problem they introduce (who cares about div2 wins anyway), rating inflation is. Of course, the winners of div2 don't introduce extra rating into the system (they drain it instead), but then there are much more non-winners of div2 that lose rating. It's easier to lose rating if you're not really good, since if you make a new account to participate in a div2 contest, start submitting, but see that you won't win, you just abandon it. I imagine that made ratings increase noticeably faster than a simple influx of newbies due to popularity.

    Fortunately, there seems to be a rating drain recently that would fix this.

    That bother me because I'm not a good person. It is important for me to estimate that I am top-X in the world now.

    Unless this becomes really common practice, ranking of active users is informative enough.

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Well since nobody has the balls to say it:

DearMargaret = EvenImage

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I can't find either jiry_2 or Syloviaely from the ratings list, did both accounts get banned?

EDIT: I'm dumb

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I think tourist is Petr's second account.

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Um_nik это второй аккаунт Huyum_nik

Умник пропустил сезон конкурса ACM, в котором учавствовал Huyum_nik и единственное адекватное тому объяснение то, что это один и тот же человек

Пруф

Также я проанализировал их код и пришёл к выводу, что у них абсолютно одинаковый кодстайл 43761463 и 18313354

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I don't think fake accounts should be banned (please don't downvote this comment if you don't agree to it, present counter-arguments in reply instead :-) )

Codeforces gives its users very poor privacy control options. I can't hide the list of problems I have solved. I can't hide my contest scores from the public. If I use one account throughout my life, people might eventually come to know my username and then they will have access to all of this information of mine (which I don't want to happen). If I create an account before a contest, participate in a contest and then throw it, my result will only be known to me. If someone comes to know one of my usernames, he will only have access to results of only a couple of contests, not all.

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Hi, I'm Alexey Navalny.

it's also known that vml, WHITE2302 and amethyst0 are belong to one person.

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Why do you say Smurfing accounts should be banned? Poor Smurfs... they are cute and nice. I never understood why some people hate them so much.

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wxh010910 is an alt account of webmaster. MikeMirzayanov please ban it.

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7 лет назад, скрыть # |
 
Проголосовать: нравится +22 Проголосовать: не нравится

It was fun with DearMargaret . HINT : From peking university.

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Rev. 2  
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.

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Rev. 2  
Проголосовать: нравится +31 Проголосовать: не нравится

May be i'm too tiny to comment here...but At least Codeforces can have Account Delete Option

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7 лет назад, скрыть # |
 
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http://mirror.codeforces.com/blog/entry/62929

DIV 2 two guys from top 5 are smurfing...

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7 лет назад, скрыть # |
 
Проголосовать: нравится -32 Проголосовать: не нравится

chuochuo looks like an alt to me (he/she reached Master in 2 contests).

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7 лет назад, скрыть # |
 
Проголосовать: нравится -18 Проголосовать: не нравится

woookje is an alt account of ko_osaga. MikeMirzayanov please ban it. Every Korean contestant knows it.

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7 лет назад, скрыть # |
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.

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6 лет назад, скрыть # |
 
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We can implement how dota does it. Unrate the first 5-10 contests of new user. Smurfs atleast need to work hard to participate in rated contests.