amethyst0's blog

Codechef and some problem
By amethyst0, history, 8 years ago, In English

About one month ago codechef send me a letter, in which they informed me, that my code was used by some other contestant in March Challenge. They gave me links to solutions and they were similar. I don't know how anybody could get my code, i'm afraid that my account was broken because my password was too weak. I have already sent two letters to the codechef administration, but i haven't received any answer yet. I really like competitions on the Codechef, and it is really sad, that they don't pay any attention to this problem. Did anybody have the same problem?

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8 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +9 Vote: I do not like it

Happened with me once(MAY16 long challenge). Ratings got dropped. Fast forward 3 months , i get an email saying that "my account is going to be suspended because you have been involved in cheating more than once" . When i argued about that , they said you were caught cheating before MAY16 also . When i asked which contest it was , i didn't receive the answer till date XD and my account wasn't suspended.

TLDR : Codechef admins , more often than not , dont know what they are doing .

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    8 years ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it +40 Vote: I do not like it

    We send an email to every case of plagiarism that we find.

    Your comment just made me dig up our emails and it says that you have been penalised two times — one for COOK57 and the other time for MAY16. And both the times the emails were sent to the same email id.

    I quickly verified from your public profile page that your COOK57 ratings were also dropped. In this instance we did not receive any response from you on email or phone to contest the case, and hence your case was considered closed. A repeat in MAY16 as per our rules do merit the account to be suspended but I believe after speaking with you on phone, we let it go.

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      8 years ago, # ^ |
        Vote: I like it -13 Vote: I do not like it

      "after speaking with you on phone , we let it go" , I think i would have remembered talking on phone about this , but i don't.

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8 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it 0 Vote: I do not like it

are you using ideone.com for testing your code?

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8 years ago, # |
← Rev. 2   Vote: I like it -39 Vote: I do not like it

@amethyst0 Can you let us know your username on CodeChef and your email address from which you have sent an email? I will check and get back to you on this.

We get many emails regarding the same and may have missed out on a few, for which we are sorry. It is not that we do not pay attention. It is very hard for us to deal with Plagiarism cases. We have laid down the rules here: https://discuss.codechef.com/questions/18662/does-codechef-have-any-code-of-conduct and we try and publicise this in every contest and in every contest invite. There are many people who do not have the intention of cheating but end up using public IDE's and sharing their code during a contest. To stop this from happening we built our own IDE where the code is not persisted on the server. We also open up our phone lines and deal with each case of plagiarism by talking to individuals. It takes away a lot of our time! Please let us know if you think we can do anything better.

We regret that this has happened in your case. Please provide us your email and we will check and get back to you at the soonest.

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    8 years ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it +20 Vote: I do not like it

    You sent me a letter few minutes ago. Ok, if you think, that I'm a cheater, it's your opinion. Thank you for your answer.

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      8 years ago, # ^ |
        Vote: I like it +30 Vote: I do not like it

      No we do not consider anyone a cheater. Let me clarify this, that we do not hold any moral right to say that someone has cheated or not. In fact for long we have not even considered the cases of cheating.

      However, amidst a lot of pressure from the community to make the contests fair, we start finding the cases of duplicate code and came up with the rules to stop doing that.

      We have started investing a lot of time in eliminating such cases. And unfortunately your code was found to be among them. Does that make you a cheater? Certainly no. There are instances when we know people are innocent and they leave the code open unintentionally. And to be fair to everyone, we have to follow the same rules for everyone. We do leave the room open for the users to contest how this happened.

      If you left your password to be too weak, then it has to be your responsibility. You need to take reponsibility of your code or else contest becomes very very unfair.

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    8 years ago, # ^ |
      Vote: I like it -21 Vote: I do not like it

    I guess sorry is ur most commonly used word.

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8 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it +58 Vote: I do not like it

They also informed me that my code is almost same as others in September Cook-Off 2016. It's because they use a problem that can be easily get related code by google. And drop me rank and rating in that competition. I send mail to argue with them but they don't reply me.

After that, I reduce the frequency of participating Codechef Contests and only read problems in most situation.

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    8 years ago, # ^ |
    ← Rev. 3   Vote: I like it -23 Vote: I do not like it

    We clearly mention in our Code of Conduct that

    "Taking help or using a third party code is not bad. Passing it off as your own is. If you are taking your code from some other source, it is expected that you give the due attribution to the source in your code. It is kind of mandatory."

    In case you have taken code from any online link and given it the due attribution in a running contest, then please accept my apologies and let us know your username and we will revert whatever penalty has been levied on you. In case you failed to give attribution, we really can't help.

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    8 years ago, # ^ |
    ← Rev. 2   Vote: I like it +14 Vote: I do not like it

    Similar problem happened with me. It was easy problem, not much harder than array sorting. I sent an email that it was coincidence, and they returned my rating back.

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4 years ago, # |
  Vote: I like it -10 Vote: I do not like it

I have thus problem too. Someone wrote a post and the contribution was reduced. And changed my password and email address. But he changed old password to qwerty123456 and i picked it up.

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