Giga_Cronos's blog

Cloudflare is screwing up contests
By Giga_Cronos, history, 11 months ago, In English

Today I had a very bad experience. I finished coding 1924C - Fractal Origami just a minute before the contest ended and when I tried to submit it, Cloudflare blocked me from doing so (this code got AC 243668438 after the testing phase, so yes, I lost rating because of this). My point is that not all of us can have a god-blessed internet connection, and Cloudflare is annoying, I lose several minutes in every contest because of this and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one. I have to wait a month between rated contests because the Div1 frequencies are bad so please remove Cloudflare, there must be several ways to prevent DDoS attacks, choose the one that doesn't affect the contestants.MikeMirzayanov

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11 months ago, # |
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there must be several ways to prevent DDoS attacks ... that doesn't affect the contestants

For example?

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11 months ago, # |
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Same here. I coded up a solution to 1925E - Space Harbour a few seconds before the contest ended, but Cloudflare prevented it from going through.

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11 months ago, # |
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And my problem is that Cloudflare, literally doesn't work. This leads to me using mirror.codeforces.com. Now what are the cons? First of all I can't view my own submissions, whenever I get a wrong answer on Test 1, I can't really see what's the checkers verdict. And second we got images, images won't load when i'm using mirror.codeforces.com, And I have to ask my friends to send pictures of problem images cause i can't view them. Note that this doesn't happen in other sites, but for some reason in Codeforces it's always like this.

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    11 months ago, # ^ |
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    Not a lot of other cp sites have 30000 concurrent users!

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      11 months ago, # ^ |
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      True! But by "other sites" I didn't mean cp-related specifically, I meant other sites that use CloudFlare. My real problem with CF is that CloudFlare just refreshes after I verify, and never allows me to use codeforces.com during contests.

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    11 months ago, # ^ |
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    now i am able to see my code in mirror.codeforces.com , earlier we couldn't but now they are opening

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11 months ago, # |
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It also disrupts some tools like CCH. Cloudflare will be checking the tool forever... :(

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11 months ago, # |
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At last somebody said

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11 months ago, # |
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Yeah, it just doesn't allow me to use codeforces from my mobile phone, lol: Youtube

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11 months ago, # |
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    11 months ago, # ^ |
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    Does it have any drawback other than it is minimal?

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      11 months ago, # ^ |
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      If you get WA on test 1, you can't view the checker comment or your code's output.

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11 months ago, # |
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even the codeforces api has the codeflare security.. i don't know what is the point of having apis then. we can't use it from a client.

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11 months ago, # |
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We can use CDN that can help distribute traffic across multiple servers and data centers, reducing the impact of a DDoS attack.

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    11 months ago, # ^ |
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    And who is going to pay for it?

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11 months ago, # |
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Totally agree. Even in some areas (like Iran) this happens every fifteen minutes in contest time and it's really annoying...

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