Hello.
After todays round, during system testing, our friend's account AhmetKaan has been disabled. AhmetKaan has been an honest participant on Codeforces for more than 7 years, never resorting to cheating even with the ups and downs of his long journey. I can personally attest to the fact that he is an honest competitor, and would never do such a thing. We believe there has been a mistake and we ask for help to recover the account. MikeMirzayanov Vladosiya
Edit:
Even though I have not much control over it, I am sorry for the complete mess this blog has turned into. Having to track all the updates and new arguments has become mentally extremely tiring for me and, I think, many of the people here. As I wasn’t actively commenting for the past few days, I have a lot of stuff to address.
When the account was first disabled, I checked his submission for problem F 365901157 (which was the hardest problem he solved) to see whether there was indeed anything suspicious about the code. I saw that there were indentation issues in the segment tree he wrote and I thought that this was likely the reason for his ban. I thought, and I still do, think this code wasn’t written by AI in any way. Only indentation errors the code seemed to have was in the segment tree, which was written in the exact way he always did. As it is mentioned a lot of times in the comments, he is a teacher, and he has given segment tree lessons to beginners so many times everyone knows how he exactly writes it. It would take a lot more time for him to make AI impersonate his segment tree rather than writing himself. Also, the segment tree contained a bug he later debugged in his submissions.
After checking the submission, I was convinced that this was the reason for the ban, and was almost certainly sure this was just a false flag, likely made by a bot rather than staff. Even though we tried to reach staff first by DM, we later decided to make a blog as it would make things faster.
I was the one who initially asked people to vouch, as I thought this ban was not much more than a result of minor indentation issues. The blog wasn’t supposed to be active for so long, and was just supposed to get attention from staff so they would fix the wrong flag.
However, the next day, when I checked the blog I saw that there were accusations made by staff about different submissions, which I also found very serious. I agree that I should have investigated submissions more thoroughly, making sure there was nothing wrong, or if there were something wrong, questioned AhmetKaan about them before posting this blog. I accept my incompetence in this matter.
Even though many of my friends in comments will get angry to me for this, I believe that people vouching for AhmetKaan, telling he has been a long time member of the community, or in any way providing these kinds of statements no longer help their cause, as the ban wasn’t just a simple trust issue or just a false flag that had to be fixed. This was a ban made by staff after investigation, and to appeal, we need a defence and counter-arguments rather than trust-based statements. I don’t think we did a great job at creating a solid defense. I also don’t think that the arguments provided by AhmetKaan were exhaustive nor written impartial enough to address every possible concern for an objective review. Given how emotionally frustrated he might be against an unfair verdict, I don’t think we can judge him. But I don’t think that we should also act like there’s no room left for suspicion and try to force a positive verdict against the final decision.
If you care to further read defending arguments, this comment was recently posted.
Even though there are some threads that discuss the situation, evaluate the accusations and the defence, provide further analysis of the submissions; most of the threads have been stacking up to just provide a nothing burger. People vouching, people who criticize vouchers, people who are just here to ragebait, people who fall for ragebait, and people outright trolling. For the people who are actually trying to help, whether they believe AhmetKaan is legit or not: please don’t post any further comments you believe contributes nothing to the conversation. It is starting to just get very tiring. At this point, it isn’t even easy to reach and find comments which are actively arguing about the situation in very important ways because of the pile that useless comments have become.
On the other hand, I want to thank everyone who was constructive, even the people who made accusations, though we don’t share the same opinion.
I hope this situation ends in a way that is satisfying for all. Even if the account stays disabled, it would at least be relieving to know that we gave AhmetKaan the best coverage he could get for his defence. However, if the account stays disabled just because of how poorly this situation was handled by us, it is going to be really heartbreaking.
Also, destructive_criticism and lul proofread this final edit, and wanted it to be known that they support me, my final stance and opinions on the matter.
