At this point, I think that just about everyone here is familiar with the recent series of blogs surrounding the case of Psychotic_D and his gang of cheaters, things which have been exposed here and by defnotmee in these two blogs (here and here) in more detail.

But what if I tell you that cheaters end up setting rounds on a regular basis too? What makes it even worse is that in some cases, these people use the goodwill of some of the coordinators for their own benefit without having any remorse for their actions, and here is one example in action which caught my attention as it made waves in some of the communities I'm in.

Background story

Cheating is more and more of a problem as shown by the fact that at almost any instance, there is at least one blog talking about a cheater or a cheating group, and this problem got worse now that cheaters can live stream solutions on various platforms.

The first notorious case of a cheater who set a round which came to my mind was the round where TimDee, someone who cheated multiple times according to this comment and the linked blog ended up being a co-author in the round (in fairness, judging from the editorial, 90% of the work wasn't done by him). I thought at first that this should be just a one off, right? Codeforces can't possibly let people who fraud their contests set rounds.

Oh dear, I couldn't have been more wrong

As the number of cheaters grew, more people started using various tricks to also fraud their way into problem setting, without respecting the current system, and I am going to show one case which stroke to my mind after having seen the discussions online. First, it is a known fact that many rounds are set based on official contests, with various degrees of quality, and what I will say here does not apply to these rounds.

While I believe many rounds are set by people based on their connections to coordinators rather than having waited in the queue, talked to coordinators and then have an actual round set up after some time (I have been involved in two such rounds and the process took about 1 year and many problem proposals in each of these, back in 2019 and 2020), nothing has been as worse as what I witnessed over the past couple of weeks. So let's present -2.71

A wannabe innovator turned cheater

Just about everyone who is somewhat more known must have received such messages over time, from various people who want to set rounds and have an easy path to getting it done. At the time, I thought he would simply just try to maybe team up with some more experienced problem writers and maybe have a round like that. Now, let's analyze his behavior during this year.

First, I had a series of messages with him where I reviewed a few of the problems, without the intention of actually coordinating him (I am not a coordinator here and also I have many other things I have to do anyways) only to then see his messages grow more and more absurd and dishonest. His initial motive according to his messages was to make Palestine proud of him before any unfortunate event happens given the ongoing conflict in the region, but going from this and turning it into a weapon to shame people into having him around is something completely different and unacceptable in my opinion.

Over the last few months, I saw his name pop out more and more and I started making some more research. One can notice here that a lot of his comments are about how he claims to be a national pioneer as far as many aspects go.

Recently, I learned that he is in the shortlist of setting a Codeforces round and given how long the queue is, plus the fact that I personally know very capable people who have to be stuck in the queue while such persons end up setting rounds on the fast track was what made me actually write this blog.

His low rating is already enough evidence for probably not having what it takes to be a problem setter, but what if I tell you that he doesn't have the knowledge about some relatively standard topics, such as DP?

At some point, he ended up joining TheForces, as shown by his profile status and his status as a moderator in their discord server, and this is where things started to become more shady, as shown by the evidence below. Given how some of TheForces' staff behave as far as reaching out to coordinators goes, our main protagonist of the blog decided to follow his lead too.

In one of his recent rounds, he was caught cheating and in many of his other rounds, he had suspicious submission times and different coding styles in the same round.

However, in yesterday's div3 round, he ended up using a solution for 1996E - Decode which was used mostly by cheaters who were given this code by someone in order to catch them off guard (there was an obvious wrong case when the answer was actually mod-1 and they printed -1, with respect to the modulo, due to adding a +1 at the beginning and removing it at the end without actually knowing what the code is doing), as shown 272834543

What does this tell us about the current problem setting system

While I acknowledge that there are things which can't be improved fast, due to a relative understaffed coordinating team, I think something which can be improved, and it is about time for such a post, is to have a clear and more transparent version of the ruleset regarding setting rounds, waiting in the queue and the coordinators responsible with each division, as according to my knowledge, at least when it comes to div3 and div4, the system is not explained anywhere, and for div1 and div2 rounds, there is the old system which seems to not work that well anymore.

Personally, I would also argue that the system of becoming a coordinator should also be more transparent, as I'm sure there are people who would love to help with that but they don't know where to reach out to or even worse, they are too shy to just DM someone from the Codeforces' staff for that (which according to my knowledge, it is the current state of affairs).

In addition, I think given that we have now several rounds where cheaters author problems, plus the rather frequent occurrence of them being among testers, who can later leak problems, something must be done about this.

I want to thank errorgorn, defnotmee, chromate00 and TheScrasse for reviewing the blog and adding more evidence.