TL;DR: Participants who registered while yellow but who dropped to purple must be official participants.

Dear CF community,

Today was supposed to be a great day. After resting from an hour-long leisurely walk around the city, I went to Codeforces to compete in Codeforces Round 931 (Div. 2). Problems A and B went smoothly, as expected. Then, an "Accepted" submission problem C followed suit. As I glanced at the right side panel of the "Problems" page, the minuscule number of solves accompanied by a two-digit count of C-solvers pushed me to continue this winning streak. To my surprise, I got D1. Then D2.

I was convinced that it would be a good day. After a brief saunter for snacks, I returned to my desk and checked the standings, expecting a top 50 finish, which would be my new personal best for a Div. 2 round.

Ranks 1 to 20 loaded onto my screen. "Hmm, was I in the top 20?" I questioned. Nope, not in the first ten nor the first fifteen. My username was nowhere to be found in the official standings. Puzzled, I checked the full standings. There, I found my username pwned, beautifully purple as it had been for existence until a transient blip of yellow, with one small detail that would change the trajectory of my day -- a tiny asterisk (*), signifying that I was joining out-of-contest.

There, it dawned on me: I registered for the competition as a yellow-rated coder before falling back to purple in the contest merely 24 hours ago (Codeforces Round 930 (Div. 1)). Was my happiness dampened for today? Certainly. Today's round would've been my best performance by a magnitude, nearing a top-20 finish among official participants.

Now, don't you think that Codeforces needs to more adequately verify who exactly are the official participants in a round? Consider the inverse of my scenario -- a purple turning red in a recent round and joining a Div. 2 as an official participant. The community would echo with complaints on injustice. And I believe the community would resonate with me, an eligible participant who just happened to have registered for the Div. 2 round a few hours early.

Consider your fellow competitive programmer who trains hard every day. He enjoys learning new algorithms and building his skills on existing ones, just as you do. He was excited to put his hard work to the test and performed superbly. But his codes were nowhere to be found, lost in the sea of unofficial red participants.

To MikeMirzayanov and the Codeforces developers, I trust that you would intervene in this discrimination against color-shifting participants. I have absolute trust in your leadership, as in this community, fairness always simmers to the surface, regardless of how long it takes, showing its radiance.

To you, voicing your support would push Codeforces toward a fairer future. Change comes from social pressure. It begins with a single blog post and spreads with your constructive comments.