Hello, Codeforces! You may have noticed that a lot of blogs are created about cheaters, and these blogs usually look at two or three users and compare their submissions.
In my opinion, this approach is fundamentally wrong. After all, such blogs are fighting not the cause but the effect of the problem.
Let me tell you a little bit about what interested me in these blogs. When I looked at the profiles of cheaters, I noticed that they are often not from one city, and sometimes live really far away from each other. It seemed to me that cheaters were sometimes in different countries as well! From that I have made a fairly simple and obvious conclusion for many — the existence of Telegram/Youtube channels, where they publish solutions to problems.
Frankly speaking, I have found such channels several times already, but I wondered if I could find "help" in Codeforces solutions if I directly entered key words like: "codeforces contest ongoing solutions telegram" into the search engine, so I entered something like that on Google and Youtube.
Imagine my surprise when I found out that such channels are very easy to find! I thought it required at least some effort!
In just two (!) minutes of searching I found two live Telegram channels with ~400 and ~700 subscribers, suggesting to write in Discord to their authors and get the solutions. I also found one Telegram group with ~800 users, where people seemed to share their secrets with each other via private messages, though sometimes they left clues in the chat.
I've also found a Youtube channel with ~200 subscribers, where some Codechef contest was streamed online.
I could have searched more, but it wasn't necessary. I'm sure I could have found a few more groups or channels. And almost certainly if I had joined one and asked around, I would have found more resources where I could get solutions.
What conclusion do I draw? A very simple one! If we are going to root cheaters, we need to influence the resources where solutions are published, while searching for individuals is expensive and not very helpful.
Moreover, such groups can be used to track cheaters (sometimes their Telegram and Codeforces nicknames are the same) and the authors of the solutions! In channels they sometimes write "Solved D, DM me for the solution", the author can be tracked by the time of submission of all problems!
In my opinion, if such groups are found, their activities will be stopped, as it was in Goodbye 2020 Round, when a large Telegram group with cheaters was discovered. So look for cheaters, join their groups and get in their way!
Conclusion: 1) Anti-plagiarism works, don't try to find cheaters yourself, it's ineffective. 2) Solutions for rounds very easy to find, and a large number of groups with cheaters, they are also not difficult to find.
Something like this. With this blog I wanted to show how serious the problem of cheating.
Surprised to see that even cheaters are affecting master's too. I thought, just we gray, green and cyans are the only one affected.
Their rating is not affected rn but they just don't want competitive programming sites to lose their credibility.
Smurf accounts are a bigger problem than cheaters.
Wrong. Smurf accounts get their points and rise to their original rank, and since your real rating starts at 1500 it barely makes any impact at low rated people. Cheater accounts constantly get rating they don't deserve and destroy the balance of the contest, leading to problems getting more submissions than they should and making people get less rating than they should.
A smurf account that goes from rating 1400 to 2100 actually got 700 points from other users (if i understant a bit of the rating system). But i agree that cheaters are worse.
cheaters will never be div 1
There is no way someone could respond to that! XD
a) "the author can be tracked by the time of submission of all problems!"
In many contest you can lock a problem and view other people's solution , so i don't think this is a good idea .
b) " join their groups and get in their way!"
How do you suggest we do that?
a) Locking a problem? I was talking about the messages in these channels, for example:
Solved A, DM me @user2281337 (17:46)
Solved B, DM me @user2281337 (18:03)
Solved C, DM me @user2281337 (18:40)
etc.
Find a user with such submission times and you will find a cheater. You will find someone who gives solutions to cheaters!
b) Goodbye Round 2020 clearly showed what will happen to such groups if they will become well-known. These groups were completely destroyed!
I thought about this idea but dont know if it will work or not, we can actually share a wrong answer ( which looks correct atleast ) and share it on these telegram groups. But somewhere in the code we will have to encode something which will help us identify this code. But we have to encode it somewhere smartly so they wont change/erase it. Ofcourse we have to send the fake solution of div2D/E because in that way many people will submit the code ( as solution for harder questions may be hard to find ) ( if we share a code for A or B then we will catch less cheaters as a lot of other cheaters share code for A and B too). After the contest, we can just search for the solution using the thing we encoded. Hopefully that will be enough proof for perma ban.