What if we associate points in contest for catching cheaters just like hacks.
What scenario I am suggesting is after the contest is over a window will be their (say 24 hrs) in which one can claim which user has cheated along with proofs. Then moderators will agree/disagree with that claim and points will be given to one who claimed (like successful hack). I believe this is a spontaneous setup bcz more the number of cheating activity, easier will be to catch one. So this will constantly keep check on cheating activity.
Advantages
Catching cheaters will be more streamlined.
People who have lost significant rating in contest will put lots of time and effort to report such incidents. That will guarantee success to reduce cheating.
The setup of this will be very similar to hacks — not much work would be required from development point of view.
Disadvantages
- Someone needs to validate if the claim was correct, for that the contest organisers need to allocate some members for this task. (Since it is time consuming process some benefits should be alocated to promote this work(kind of sh*twork)).
PS — Don't know whom to tag, please someone do that in comments.
This can backfire, and this will backfire. A lot. Grief is a powerful emotion, and you can't expect the majority of everybody to be emotionlessly precise and objective.
What wrong can go if it backfires ?
Also we don't need majority to participate in catching cheaters, only a fraction of population can serve for its success
Honestly if limiting this idea to a subset of users, then this is an idea already proposed a number of times before, and the issue with it has also presented in these proposals (mostly inconsistent flow and/or lack of manpower), and imo it's not like uphacking where it could be somewhat optional to uphack, while detecting cheater, at least morally speaking, is more of a duty.
For the backfiring by grief, imagine mass false-positives. That would destroy/demoralize the moderators' efforts in filtering those reports.
No, I am not saying that only a subset should be given this option to contribute. Its more like whoever is willing to
mass false positive claims and lack of manpower is a problem I agree, but a sub-optimal path can also be taken. Like deciding valid claim by voting. I understand with voting their are chances of false positive getting proven guilty but probably that level of collateral damage can be accepted in order to establish the fear of getting caught while cheating.
This would need a lot of deep thinking than just this. I'm afraid there are a lot of constraints/structures of the vote statistics that should be handled to conclude with enough confidence which submission is a cheat and which is not.
If there existed a mapping good enough (I'd hope something in the 99th percentile), then perhaps it could do. After all, auto-antiplag implemented in CF already had false positives and they could be manually reverted, so it's not like your idea is fully impossible, but it's still a long way.
this isnt bad, but i can see people making alts, blatantly cheating on them and then reporting themself for points
A simple rule can be made that profiles below some rating (say 1000) will not be checked for cheating.
So for making their alts available for gaining points through this, one have to put considerably large time in making their alts viable for cheating.
This wont entirely eradicate this but will significantly reduce it.
that might be fine, but also there would probably be more than 5000 claims by salty people who cant cope with the fact that they lost rating, and i doubt the mods want to bother that much with that
as said above, A voting mechanism could be used for reducing burden of mods. and unsuccessful cheating claim attempt should harm the claimer in some sence
What'll happen if one just submit hundreds of "unsuccessful catching attempt" just like hundreds of "unsuccessful hacking attempt"? One of my friends get -36 rating this way.