How I got Sabotaged In GR17

• I was participating in the Global Round, submitting my ordinary wrong answers on pretest 2 on problem A when I got a notification that I got a Codeforces message (it was around 20 minutes into the round). Didn't give it much thought and immediately opened it to find the following message:

• Now, because of this, I couldn't submit the solution to the problem anymore, since it would be considered cheating, even though I am pretty sure I would have found the edge-case myself. So, I had to participate the whole round with ~400 points less than I could have gotten myself. I know they didn't have bad intentions, but let's be fair, cheating is bad in any manner.

The Problem

• The same way I got the undesired external help, how many other people have gotten it? For how many was it actually undesired? And what if others submitted the solution and replied with help to another problem as well?

Possible Solution

• Cheating is almost impossible to stop, but we can at least reduce it. I suggest just totally removing the possibility of messaging during a round (2-3 hours of not being able to message on codeforces shouldn't be that big of a deal) or at least make it available for a smaller subset of people (maybe based on rating, or trust factor). At least it would make cheating harder, and stop cases where people randomly "help" without you even asking for it.