Hello everyone!
This time I won't be asking you for help on problems, it's not related to programming at all. But these days I really often come across some strange topics by this user dnjfurnck. All topics look the same way — the content of the blog contains some link and those posts get a huge amount of upvotes in no time. Once he even copy-pasted this blog by RetiredAmrMahmoud. I posted a comment with the link to the original topic, asking why he was doing that and guess what — my comment got something like -20 in 3-4 minutes.
Is there any way Codeforces can prevent such things happen? I think it should be stopped :)
How can this be possibly prevented? I suppose that this guy just has several dozens of fake accounts to upvote himself. From server side it's only logging in, upvoting, logging out — something that real user can do too. If he uses different ip addresses then, AFAIK, there is no way to detect it.
Those things happen really really fast, I guess he is using some script. I don't know much about those things, I just wonder if there's a way to detect that it is not an actual human being, like for example spambots are being detected by e-mail services. I can't imagine him voting with this tempo. And sorry if the question is stupid :)
Yeah, I also think that it's automated. But still you can't really tell this fakes from real accounts being active in the same period of time.
Though, maybe it is suspicious if someone logs in and out in several seconds?..
I think Codeforces should look through accounts who upvotes for him. They can find some evidences of unfriendly behaviors. For example, if those accounts are unrated, their recent activities consist of only votes but no submissions, then with a high probability that those accounts are created only for the purposes of gaining unfair contributions.
Or cf staff might probably prevent such things to happen in future. By setting vote weight to 0 on some conditions. Like if you're either grey or have less than 3-5 contests. It's actually already hard to get lots of account rated, and with first condition you also need to solve something in a different way with each account which sounds nearly impossible.
UPD: btw, having one problem solved during ranked contest should be fine too.
While such behavior should be slammed down, but seriously, this is even more meaningless than copying others code during contest for rating...
What are you proposing? Is it right for a plagiarist, who's not coming up with anything new or useful, to be alongside with the top contributors, who are dedicating a part of their time to provide quality information? He's not that far away from getting there atm.
If you say this is meaningless, there's obviously something else wrong, what would be meaningful to deal with? Care to elaborate?
I am not saying down that slamming them down is unnecessary, but the fact that someone is addicted to the contribution scale is even worse than being addicted to ratings.
While it might seem cool to be a part of the top contributors of CF, "but why" would you do that when everyone knows that you are just blatantly shitposting and script for upvotes.
Well, yes, any addiction is not good. This obviously isn't about addiction. This kind of behaviour described in the original post though, is messing up with the statistics. For example, ratings offer you a perspective about how you perform in contests similar to other users. This way you can set goals (e.g. I want to push myself for the very best performance to beat user X in the next contest because he's better than me at the moment, statistically speaking) and completing them will give you self esteem and a better performance in the contests to come. How would you be able to do such things if most of the users around your rating are cheaters?
Similar goes for contribution, it's a way to reward quality posts. Obviously, there isn't any real competition here and most people don't care, but disallowing dishonesty is not about a contribution addiction, it's an appreciation for the people who often provide good information in their posts.