bugkiller: I don’t think “You should first get a life” has anything to do with coding locally. In fact, it’s just a baseless insult.
7 Likes
Firstly thanks for bringing all these cheating cases to our notice. We are in the process of developing a strict mechanism, which will curb the repeated cheating cases in all our contests. We will soon be bringing in the process and once it is in the practice we will take all the cheating cases since October Challenge 2013 into consideration and will take apt action against all the users involved in any such false practices.
4 Likes
@xellos0 >> I don’t care what you think or conclude from that. My second statement did mean about coding locally. Next, whether it’s baseless or not I don’t know but if it is an insult I will insult such a person who don’t care about putting his code NOT PUBLIC. Solving 9 / 10 problems and I don’t know if he used public in all his code then it is a serious offense. It’s his responsibility to mark it private, in which he failed. Its written in the code of conduct. You’re an old member, don’t support his negligence. No further arguments from my side.
bugkiller: “Get a life” has nothing to do with Ideone, marking codes private or this topic overall. For me, it means “get a real life instead of living behind a computer and programming”, because that’s how it’s often used by haters on the Internet. Maybe it’s just a bad choice of words from your side…
2 Likes
I don’t know how much action is actually taken against cheaters. Rating updates are delayed sometimes and it’s claimed to be because of removing cheaters, but we see almost identical codes even long after contests. There was a case when a post mentioned 2 cheaters, and several weeks later, it mentioned that no action had been taken against them. Wat?
The first thing to do is unification of rules. A lot is only mentioned in FAQ or Code of Conduct posts, but who’d read that… in fact, who’d read the rules in the problems’ page? I know that well: we’re lazy and don’t want to read boring stuff like that. Nevertheless, it should be all unified. And the rules against cheaters should be especially pointed out among these.
This opens one more possibility: strong punishments. FB Hacker Cup disqualified someone for posting anything about the problems in comments. It was nothing big, but he broke the rules and was disqualified. In this case, just one disqualification is weak: temporary/permanent ban. Or IP ban, or subnet ban (which is not a good idea, though :D). Something that’d teach people that if they cheat once, they won’t be given a chance to do so again for a long time.
Most importantly, the submit needs a bot which’d scan any submitted/accepted (pick one) solution against other ones (during/after the contest, pick one again) and if it detects excessive similarity, report (or outright disqualify/ban) the user in question. It doesn’t seem that hard to do.
Also, it’d be good to publish a list of proved cheaters for every contest. Something like a Hall of Shame.
Although with the way things have been going (or standing), I doubt Codechef will ever give any regard to these ideas.
EDIT: This is off-topic, but it’s also a change that should be made. Comments should give karma if upvoted. Maybe less than answers, but still, they should give karma. Sometimes a comment is much more useful than an answer.
6 Likes
You missed that comment from @admin probably…
Firstly thanks for bringing all these cheating cases to our notice. We are in the process of developing a strict mechanism, which will curb the repeated cheating cases in all our contests. We will soon be bringing in the process and once it is in the practice we will take all the cheating cases since October Challenge 2013 into consideration and will take apt action against all the users involved in any such false practices.
I don’t know what will or might happen, but fact is that specific pointed out cheaters were not disqualified for several weeks at least. With that kind of negligence, I don’t trust future tense.
2 Likes
I agree, if those users are not punished, they will do it again and again and again…