Hi everyone!

Today, I noticed a comment by djm03178 who at the moment has +51 successful and -23 unsuccessful hacks in Round 952. If you look on the hacks, you'll see that e.g. last four were made in the span of one minute, and there are similar streaks before that.

It looks like djm03178 (and, to be fair, some other users too) uses some kind of automated tools that detect solutions using unordered_set or unordered_map, and then send hack tests in bulk. From my perspective, hacks that exploit programming language's internal bugs are generally unsportsmanlike and should not be encouraged, as hacks (imo) were designed to exploit algorithmic inefficiencies, rather than obscure language properties.

But even that aside, Codeforces rules seem to forbid using any kind of assistive tooling for hacks:

Attempting to digitally extract other contestant's code during the hacking is considered cheating. You may not use any technical/digital tools to obtain other contestant's code, including (but not limited) OCR, traffic capture, browsers plugins and so on. The only allowed method to analyze other contestant's solution is reading it in a hacking window. However it is allowed to manually retype the solution or it's parts to run it locally.

Sure, it may be questionable whether the paragraph applies when it is unofficial participation, and in an open hacking phase, where you can just copy paste code directly, but the wording as it is now is prohibitive in all cases. It also seems that such extensive hacking creates additional load on systests, as stefdasca recently noticed, so such automated hacking are also likely to violate the following:

You are forbidden to perform any other actions that can in any manner destabilize the judging process.

Also pinging MikeMirzayanov to draw attention to the situation and for potential comments.