Recently there have been many blogs on CF about AI cheaters or bots slowing down the queue. Many users are giving their thoughts about how to stop these issues. But these blogs are clogging up recent actions, and hiding good blogs. So, here is a list of the solutions some users have suggested, and please do not post another blog about them. I will also be writing about the issues about these solutions and perhaps shed some light about why they have not been implemented. If I missed any, please tell me in the comments.
For bots
- Adding phone/email/IP verification: VPNs and temporary emails exist. Also, it is not hard to obtain many phone numbers.
- Reducing submissions of unrated accounts: many people use CF for practice only or live in time zones where contests are at a bad time (I am both). Also, these bot makers could just make many accounts and discard them once their submission limit is reached.
- Limiting frequency of submissions: A normal user could, when doing a problem with many edge cases for example, submit multiple times per minute for a short amount of time. However, bots can spread their submissions across many accounts and bypass this.
For cheating
- Some kind of verification before getting rating: People who cheat will want rating more than the average user, so this will only be a small hurdle for them while posing a larger problem for honest users. For example, cheaters will be more than happy to pay 10$ for getting rated, while normal users might not be.
- better plag check: A good idea, but CF's plag check already is very good, and can spot similar logic even through different variable names, so this is hard to upgrade.
- Greater punishments: False positives exist, but overall a good idea. I hope CF can implement this too.
These solutions are not very bad, but they have been made tens of times. If Mike thinks that any of these should be implemented, he will surely be doing so now. So, please don't make more blogs about them again, and let the recent actions page become uncluttered.
