Few suggestion

  1. In every contest cheating cases keeps on happening. I guess the best solution to this problem is that codechef provide its own IDE like hackerrank so users can test their code on codechef itself.

  2. In a live contest, SUCCESSFUL SUBMISSIONS along with ALL SUBMISSIONS section should be blocked because it gives away hints regarding memory usage and time taken like in case of PROB.

  3. Also, the comment section should be modified such that only admin and that particular user can see each other’s comment or as suggested by @kcahdog that all comments be approved by admin before being posted.

  4. And please shorten the long contest to 7 days. Since, it is enough.

  5. Run one day short contest with 4 straight forward and 1 challenge problem.

  6. And one more thing now codechef have enough users so, can there be a percentile section along with ranking.

  7. And… one more suggestion please try to update ratings within 2-3 days after contest ends.

11 Likes

I agree with the 2nd point,memory usage and time limit do provide valuable insight about nature of the question(eg 0.00 time means o(n) or a general formula approach). Although, this cannot prevent cheating, but can make contest more interesting :smiley:

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  1. Agree. Providing a IDEone like interface for submit, will certainly help.
  2. This isn’t about cheating, but yeah they are hints. It should be done for live contest but on low priority.
  3. No this defeats the purpose of comments. Instead there should be active moderation, so that comments giving hints are deleted.

Rest are just personal opinions and wishes.

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I would suggest that all comments be approved by admin before being posted.Only those that help clarify the question should be posted.

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i am backing you up for the 6 point.

@spandanpathak what about the rest of the points.

in accordance with point 6 ,what I think is codechef should also provide the number of active users in contest as well as in general .

These are good suggestions. Let us try and answer them.

  • In every contest cheating cases keeps on happening. I guess the best solution to this problem is that codechef provide its own IDE like hackerrank so users can test their code on codechef itself.

Ans: We believe that this is a useful feature but we are not very sure of it helping us to stop cheating. We believe that the only thing that can stop cheating is good intent. We have this feature in our priority list since quite sometime now. It will still take us sometime to get this up.

  • In a live contest, SUCCESSFUL SUBMISSIONS along with ALL SUBMISSIONS section should be blocked because it gives away hints regarding memory usage and time taken like in case of PROB.

Ans: This is a very interesting suggestion. To be frank, we never thought about this. This will require significant design changes on the UI as the same is available at many places across the website. We will certainly ponder more on this and decide what should be done on this. May take some time to be implemented. Please bear with us till then.

  • Also, the comment section should be modified such that only admin and that particular user can see each other’s comment or as suggested by @kcahdog that all comments be approved by admin before being posted.

Ans: Fair point. However, there are cons of it as well. The approval may take time and the reply can be very late and demotivate the users. We do so in a short contest. But having it in a long contest is a bit tricky. Also we do not presently have a feature of contest wise comment approval. The entire website will be affected. So the contest wise feature has to be built and may take some time. But if the community is convinced that this is the way to go this can be built on priority.

  • And please shorten the long contest to 7 days. Since, it is enough.

Ans: This has been discussed and debated for long. We are not convinced about this and do not intend to do this in near future. Read more about our response here.

  • Run one day short contest with 4 straight forward and 1 challenge problem.

Ans: Good suggestion. We would love to have more contests but unfortunately we are a small team and there is already so much to be done. We have a long list of things to be done and first we want to do justice to those pending points. Having more contests is very desirable but then we really do not have the capacity to take more of them.

  • And one more thing now codechef have enough users so, can there be a percentile section along with ranking.

Ans: This can indeed be done. We will add this to our feature list. Again, it will take us some time. Please be patient.

  • And… one more suggestion please try to update ratings within 2-3 days after contest ends.

Ans: Yes. We will try and do so from next time onwards. We wanted to first resolve the reported cases of cheating before calculating the ratings. But unfortunately we got occupied in other tasks. We really regret the delay. We will try and be more prompt in this. We completely understand the anxiety of the users and sincerely apologize for the same.

7 Likes

If you can be more specific on the data that you want and define the same, we will be happy to ponder on the possibility. If it can be done, it will be taken up.

@admin thanks for the reply

basically i just wanna know my competition. if codechef could tell number of active users( by active users i mean who in general participate in contests )on the homepage then it would be helpful .