As we all know, cheating has become more and more commonplace. After almost every contest, someone makes a blog finding users who submitted almost identical programs. Almost all of the time this happens, people comment on the blog saying harsher measures need to be taken against cheaters (rating penalty, cheater tag, etc) so that people are incentivized against cheating. The right punishment would be just enough to discourage further cheating attempts but not so severe that people make new alts.
Amid all of this chaos, we have not heard a single word from MikeMirzayanov. This is the final call, please tell us what you plan to do about cheaters.
If we do not hear from you in 3 days, I will begin work on an online tool that shuffles and reorders pasted code in such a way that the transformed code looks sufficiently different and passes codeforces cheating detection tests. This will then be made publicly available to everyone. I suspect this will result in a significant breakdown of codeforces contests and rating calculations as cheating would become extremely common, being very easy and almost risk-free. A new cheating detection algorithm will also have to be worked upon (more development costs for you).
It is my humble request to you, MikeMirzayanov, please focus on this issue. If you don't, we will not sit by idly waiting as these cheaters grow in number.
I'm pretty sure that you get rating penalty(by all of your solutions being skipped and not being out of competition) if you cheat multiple times, at least that's what I saw from looking at a few people who had their A skipped in the last contest. You can see that most people with skipped A have a star next to their name(out of competition, probably first time cheating) while some don't(people who already cheated before).
That's not enough. Cheaters must get more punishment than just their solutions being skipped. A -300 penalty for example would make more sense then just getting +0 for a contest a person cheats in.
Like I said, you get a big rating penalty if you cheat multiple times. https://mirror.codeforces.com/profile/hudingyuhaiyou is an example i found from last round's skipped As.