A lot of people in today's contest have copied code from various sources. A youtube channel was continously posting solutions during the contest. He posted A,B,C,D solutions within the first hour of the contest.
Numerous people copied code from here and made slight changes into the code and submitted and got AC. I request you to get this channel banned as soon as possible and take whatever action is required so that codeforces ratings do not loose credibility.
These channels distribute solutions during live contest and even the people who cannot solve A end up solving 3 to 4 problems. So it's better if these channels are banned asap else there is no point in giving these contests when someone can cheat and easily get a better rank than you.
Man how many groups are there :(, every week I see some new groups XD
True, it's like the more you look the more follow.
Well, it seems the more we guys discover these groups, the more sources / ways the cheaters gets to know. The only way to stop, IMO, is tracing the variations in submission templates / coding manner. As, cheaters can't use their logic / style through the contests. Maybe there can be other efficient ways, but it's about preventing this.
It's sad that the cheater in this case is probably 1800+ or 1900+. He's doing it to ruin the spirit of the contest. I saw one of his comments and he thinks he's helping people. He also mentioned he will do it for every contest. So basically div2 D will have like 2k+ submissions.
Lol the cheater doesn't deserve this rating
Codeforces should do something to identify these cheaters and should permanently ban their ids. It hurts when you are competing honestly and then find that all of this is happening
This cheating thing is getting really serious.
i wonder how you found out about these telegram channels and that youtube channal :thonk:
The account 'CodewithAG' was involved in last contest as well. I think he is a user with somewhere 1800-2000-ish rating and is doing this for fun and encouraging the cheating system in codeforces. It's kinda similar to the concept of "Some men, just want to watch the world burn", Mike should ASAP improve the MOSS/Plagiarism detector in Codeforces, because too many people are cheating now, given that he provided answers to first 4 problems before completing 1 hour into contest.
FFS stop making the channel more popular, thats exactly what the channel owner wants
Someone send this you tube channel link in one of the telegram groups after today's contest. So..
You should dm this issue to Mike instead of posting it here as more people will be attracted to such channels and groups
Is there any codeforces support e-mail id where I can report this??
I think just tagging Mike would suffice in most cases.
i dont think posting about people cheating in contests is any bad. I know many people dont like this kinda blogs at this point because a lot of them have been written so far, but its more like spreading awareness on how bad cheating is by exposing those people who cheated.
MikeMirzayanov I tagged him, now he can see the issue!
Yo guys, Mike knows what's going on, after all he made the codeforces, so please stop tagging him everytime you catch a new cheater.
I am thinking, How do you find these telegram channels?
1) Go to Play Store 2) Search Telegram 3) Download telegram and install it 4) Open telegram App go to search at top-right corner 5) Type anyword related to coding then...
Dm me if u have any more queries.
I started coding recently after so long and I was thinking that the number of people solving D has really blown up.
To the cheaters, good luck finding solutions in an onsite contest or an interview.
You cannot ban this channel, because if you do so, other channel will be created. The best way to reduce cheater is only every competitors should be honest
I think Codeforces can take some punitive measures.In a chinese OJ, luogu, if you cheat in contests, the anit-cheat system will find you and clean all your submission records and will turn your name's color into brown to show that you are a cheater.
Great idea. However, this cannot reduce the amount of cheater. Since the account created for free, the cheater will create other account if they become "banned" color.
Maybe ban IP can solve the problem?
A device can have more than one IP. Similarly, a group of devices have the same IP, which is also known as private IP. Example, a common network shared among schools, universities.
Please read networking basics before commenting anything stupid.
There was NOTHING stupid in his/her question,as nobody is supposed to know networking basics for asking questions, or even comment... I even consider the idea good as the cheating morons probably would need more sense than they actually for painstaking creating accounts by changing IPs.
My apologies. I didn't realise that. But still, IP blocking is not a solution.
Suppose, there are some students belonging to same university, so all of them have same IP. Now, if one student cheats, why should the other students suffer because of him?
But what it will do is , once someone's account is flagged for cheating, other people who follow them, maybe their friends or peers in college or maybe even their haters will get to know that this person cheats and than it will be very shameful for that person.
Most cheaters cheat for ratings , if we set cheaters' rating to 0 ,I think it will decrease the amount of cheaters efficiently.
I'm so shocked that there are persons who use Youtube to cheat. And I think cheating in contests only does harm to everyone. Cheaters in CCF's contests can face a three years' ban from all official contests.
Chinese OIers nearly all know a famous cheater: 【】(This is only a symbol of him),and I don't want to tell you his name : Ka*****07.
He uses SSH in HNOI2021 to copy other competitors' codes. He was caught and his score was declined.
How do would we even get the channel banned ? I mean its unethical from our point of view but is it violating any Youtube Community Guidelines or their Terms of Service? :(
CF ratings will be obsolete in no time if this continues.
I wonder if Codeforces could implement a report option with restrictions (may be rating greater than >1600 and maximum of 2-3 solution reports in a contest and after 2-3 useless reports by user, the report option be seized from the user).
I just notices codeforces also decreses the rating when found plagarism by a a large number. This is also a big threat. But noticed just now that Master_Jiraya experienced a huge negative delta due to plagarism in previous contest, he did the same today. This decrement is definitely not enough
Such contestants should be removed instead of skipping their submissions! They don't just affect other contestants' ratings but decrease the credibility of CodeForces ratings!!
Breaker-iwnL- See this, he reached close to 2000 rating just by cheating :(
It's interesting that kedos123 used code obfuscation in every recent contest. But only got caught and penalized specifically in that previous contest, where he forgot to obfuscate his A — Arithmetic Array submission.
He kinda learned his lesson and improved. All his submissions for every problem are carefully obfuscated now. This will probably keep him safe this time around.
There's another very funny observation. He did fail his initial submissions for problems B and C only because he had that unnecessary
cin>>t;line in hismainfunction. The guy somehow has correct solutions (it's magic!), except that these solutions don't really work because he reads the input data in a wrong way. For problem B he even spent a considerable amount of time and had multiple failed submissions before figuring out what went wrong. Troubleshooting C only took 2 minutes.As Obito Uchiha once said, "Those who copy paste solutions are scum, but those who post the solutions during an on-going contest are worse than scum".
for the first time i solved 2 questions , i was very happy , but then this happens , and now feel my pain :(
1k+ view on problem 'D' -_- now that's why there are too many solve in the problem 'D'.. come on man please don't make Codeforces contests like Codechef long contests :(
Isn't there any way to stop this type of mass cheating?
codeforces should create a "report user for cheating" option soon
Cheating is disgusting. See his submissions:- https://mirror.codeforces.com/submissions/veteranic
nice username btw
nice dp too.
Why is there no permanent punishment for cheaters? I believe that the cheating problem is unfixable, and the only thing one can hope for is to reduce its extent. And right now, I think the benefit of successfully cheating is much greater than the cost payed on potentially getting caught.
Totally agree... If it's very clear that the contestant has cheated, don't give them another chance.. instead of skipping submissions just immediately delete those accounts!
This might sound crazy, but I think that the best way of getting rid of the rising cheating is by making 10 times more similar channels/groups and start spamming wrong solutions.
I am considering this as the best possibility because I came to know that Telegram / YouTube / Discord doesn't give a crap about codeforces.
This might also be a terrible idea I'm just giving an opinion.
This method might be effective. In fact, I heard about one kind of competition, where jury posted some solutions pretending to be right, but containing a clear and ridiculous mistake obvious for those who are able to solve the task correctly. Actually, it worked surprisingly effective. Cheaters were easily detected and banned from furhter participaing. There was no testing system though (it was not the coding competition) and all the solutions were manually checked, so I'm not quite sure how it might work in this case. But in my honest opinion, it should be given a try.
(sorry for my bad English)
If that is how it's going to be, I request you to make a blog about it so other guys could share their opinion about this. And if there's no bigger issue(than literally mass cheating) then we all can give it a shot.
The reason I'm asking you to do it is because people will give more weight to what you say. A blog written by me will be blown away like air.
I really don't understand why would anyone cheat, what's the point in getting something you don't deserve?
To satisfy the desire of proving themselves maybe.
The amount of time people spend in thinking of these cheating tactics and finding these telegram groups and youtube channels, if they spend half of that in practicing might get better ranks!!
I think one solution is to judge all solutions after contest, no pretest and prejudges.
Guys here is the good news , again this fucking loser twoseven cheated. God this guy is unstoppable.
Leaked code of C: https://ideone.com/NMPWQJ
His code of C: https://mirror.codeforces.com/contest/1539/submission/120081518
Leaked code of D: https://ideone.com/JoxG94
His code of D: https://mirror.codeforces.com/contest/1539/submission/120105206
the codes are not same, so chill .
no these are same. The leaked code was changed stupidly like "sort(arr.begin(),arr.end(),sort_on_second); reverse(arr.begin(),arr.end());"
One of the more effective ways should be simply perma banning people after they get three or more strikes, so in that way, innocent people would not get straight up banned, and cheaters would then have to work their way through the ranks all over again, repeatedly, which would most likely deter them. Like I do not understand why so many cheaters get off the hook like this. Like I have seen people get caught three or more times already, but they still get to participate contests and do anything. For instance, PhantomAssassin, this guy's only rating drops are when he gets caught cheating.
The actual problem regarding cheating is, most of the times the people who are
1700+are not much affected by these people, as they usually solve till D. But those who are honestly trying, get swayed away by these people, and their rating gets affected so much that, they can never cross the1300-1500range, cuz they got to solve D (which is usually a little for people in that range) continuously and fast as well.I'm not convinced that cheating really has that much effect on rating yet. Sizeable batches of cheaters are removed regularly after contests and my placement in the scoreboard sometimes jumps by 100-200 positions, but rating changes are usually just unimpressive +1 or +2 as a result. I have never seen a big rating improvement after cheaters removal.
It's possible that a lot of cheaters manage to avoid detection. But again, how much of the rating change would you expect if all of them were caught? My random guess is that you would probably get just something like a +5 rating improvement at best.
I think that improving your skill is still the best way to improve your rating and cheaters are only a minor hindrance. Of course, unless their numbers increase by an order of magnitude. But the existing anti-cheater countermeasures seem to be reasonably effective and prevent the cheaters population from growing too much. So there's no need to be overly dramatic yet.
One Solution could be like this — Instead of having 2 hours for the contest, split the contest into 2 parts of 30 minutes each. If you reduce the contest duration, it will be tough to cheat.
Look at this cheater from my college. He changed code from c++ to python and still his solution pass plag check. Please ban him admin.
Cheater solutuon
Same code as youtube channel. MikeMirzayanov geranazavr555
why can't people just evaluate their performance considering cheaters... instead of complaining about injustice of life
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It took you 50 minutes to solve a single problem A in one contest and more than 2 hours to solve a single problem A in another contest. How does your suggestion even make any sense for your own account? The ridiculous 5 or 15 minutes long time limits are completely non-workable, unless you turn the whole contest into a quiz.
See.. the 5 or 15 minutes i have mentioned are just guidelines. The whole point is that only if you fix the time allowed to solve a problem, the cheating will reduce. As you mentioned, In my case, i may solve the problem A in 50 minutes. But the problem will become unrated for me. So the next time i will try to improve my timing and solve the problem quickly.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cp-calendar/gnnibhojjocbjpkhhlphelmiiffodajj
ohh that's why my rating is not increasing ,i thought that i am not practicing XD
Cheaters cheat because they want to put up those fake ratings on Linkedin, maintain a fake reputation among the peers, and other similar purposes, so I propose whenever a cheater is caught just freeze the edit profile section such that they can't edit any personal information like name and organisation and tag their profile as cheater. Only shame can bring these people down.
Lol, he can't even solve E within an hour, what a noob.
He should rename his channel : Code with a Looser.
Why not CF make an official blog "Wall of shame" to add all cheaters?
PS: Why not CF start a plag-detecting contest like hashcode to improve the moss algorithm?
Hash Code problems are still toy problems. You need a dedicated team to improve the plagiarism detector, not hackathons with random people.
A conspiracy theory:
Did anyone think about the case where the -cheater-catchers- are spreading the solutions intentionally to find cheaters just like AN0M?
PS: -cheater-catchers- plz don't make this dumb move it is just a theory
Yeah man! This Cheating thing is getting very serious now. I know its a waste of time to comment on this but something strict rules or system should be created by Codeforces. It's the only platform left where Quality Problems and Quality Contests are being held.
MikeMirzayanov pls look into this.
This can't be solved entirely but can be minimized. These kinds of youtube channels get free advertisements from CF blogs, not this one but where they add the youtube channel links. and those who want to cheat actually subscribe to these channels and the situation gets worse. People should use their original accounts to accuse people of cheating, not some alt account which also decreases the credibility of the blog and a lot of people go on falsely accusing people. The option of writing a blog should only be unlocked after a 1000+ rating. And lastly, there should be strict action for cheating instead of making the plag checker better the id's which are involved in cheating should be publicly shamed and should not be allowed to participate in contests.
Every time i feel that i have solved this particular question very fast, there must have been less submissions for this problems till now and then i find that more than 2000 people have already solved this problem. This didn't use to happen earlier.
If telegram is sponsoring codeforces , can we request them to assist our ideas to ban these telegram groups ?
The cheater generally post solutions on ideone or pastebin. Mike can check from the links his IP address thing or something which can help in tracing that guy.
"...else there is no point in giving these contests when someone can cheat and easily get a better rank than you."
Somewhat correct. However, the biggest threat from cheaters, isn't that someone is getting better rank than you. That can be solved by just practicing more and getting better. It'll be slower, but it can be done.
The biggest threat from cheaters, is the devaluation of your codeforces rating.
As more cheaters creep in, the codeforces rating's value decreases in the industry. Companies won't be interested in future even if you have master or grandmaster rating. Even if you grind 2 years to reach red, your rating may become useless.
This is why, I, personally, hate cheaters.
i think the best way to stop is to be cruel punishment for ever who cheat like ban him from competing in the next 10 contests then at least some of them will fear to cheat
As far as I have observed, most of the solutions are copied from ideone (don't know much about it). I think maybe that's something that could be avoided, idk. But yes, cheating sucks but don't affect you much as at max we get a rating rise of 3-4 after eliminating cheaters and considering many people might not get caught in plagiarism ,that would still mean a rise of max 7-8 maybe. But those cheating get benefitted a lot in terms of rating, that affects the credibility of ratings but kindly don't mention names of Youtube or discord channels that would create more cheaters.
I hope CodeForces division 2 shan't end up like CodeChef's division 3 long challenges ;( .
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cp-calendar/gnnibhojjocbjpkhhlphelmiiffodajj