Hello Codeforces,
My Cheater Database has just surpassed 2000 caught users! I write this blog to mark this momentous occasion — and would like to thank everyone who has sent reports, whether or not they were accepted. I would also like to thank my amazing admin team, who have also contributed to the development of the site and accepting reports.
Finally, I would like to thank whichever kind soul in Mumbai, India (according to Vercel) decided to DDoS the site the other day, your service to the community is greatly appreciated.!
Now, a few important points that I should reiterate, to ensure both the site and the Codeforces community stay as positive as possible:
- Please STOP polluting "recent actions" with blogs about cheaters. It's not really a good experience for anyone, whether new users or veterans, to open up Codeforces and see a billion new blogs about some random new GPT cheater. It also won't speed up the process of them getting banned from the site. It's just irritating, so don't do it.
- I am not a Codeforces admin, nor is cry or any other contest writer. Therefore, asking us to ban people is useless, because we simply do not have the power to do this. What we are already doing is reporting high-rated cheaters to the admins directly, and this issue is slowly getting dealt with, so please be patient.
- When writing reports, please send specific submission links. As admins, it wastes our time when users just send us links to the user's profile.
- Please refrain from writing racist comments/blogs about cheaters. Cheating is bad, full stop. No need to weaponise the cheating issue on this site to justify your racist prejudices, there is simply no way doing this can possibly be good for anyone involved.
Also, a number of users have complained that not all cheaters are showing up as cheaters on the Chrome extension. This has been fixed, and it is due to an extremely stupid bug that I let through on an old version of the extension. Please update to the latest version of the extension, and this will no longer be an issue.
Finally, if anyone wants to fix the Firefox version of the extension, please go ahead and do so, then make a PR, because I don't have a clue how Firefox extensions work.
What is up with the tags?
If admins won't ban cheaters, the least we can do is publicly shame them, right?
If you would like to join the fun, get the extension!!!
When I first saw this it got -2 votes.Why?
Probably the cheaters
can someone give me the link to extension please?
https://github.com/macaquedev/cf-cheater-highlighter
2000 is a large sample size, you can give us some good infographics! Some histograms with rating distribution, number of participated contests, and less relevent but more fun things like regional patterns etc.
Btw, what do you think about adding authorization via Codeforces on your site (like it's done on clist.by, for example), so that you can see who submitted a report? Then you can make a top cheat hunters (which is fun) and ban spammers (which is useful).
Also, it seems that you've not updated the latest release yet, its 29 june.
anyone can make an alt account on codeforces, free of charge, unfortunately
a big point of this is preserving privacy and encourage anonymous reporting
Yes, but it takes some time and can make spamming more difficult.
I don't really understand why it is good to encourage anonymous reporting. At the same time, I can definitely see some benifits in some cases of an anonymous report for a person who submitted it. Moreover, devs can add an option to not make your nickname public when submitting a report.
So I can't see any drawbacks, except that it requries some time to implement.
We've had instances of people sending us death threats through the website, so for the safety of people who are reporting, I think it's important to ensure everyone is anonymous.
I have a psychological strategy to suggest.
Instead of banning someone immediately after identifying them, it might be more effective to delay the ban for a few weeks—or even months. The reason is psychological: if you ban them right away, they’ll likely just create a new account without much hesitation.
But if you wait, the uncertainty can work in your favor. During that time, the person may be stuck in a kind of mental paralysis, wondering whether they’ve been caught or not—“Should I stop? Should I create a new account? Am I being watched?” This state of doubt can discourage them more effectively than an instant ban.
Even if they stop cheating, applying the ban later reinforces consequences and adds weight to it.
What do you think of this ?
nah just ban them
I like this idea, perhaps this could be combined with shadow-banning some of these users from everyone not sharing the same IP. This isn't fool-proof, but it stops the lowest common denominator of cheating as well as decreasing the clutter on the leaderboards.
I guess this is already implemented by Codeforces by coincidence. Codeforces ban the cheaters that are getting skipped for like 2 contests, but not immediately when they get skipped.
What about all the influence they have in rating bc of their cheating?
Maybe rollback will recalculate the rating.
$$$2000$$$ cheaters in $$$7$$$ weeks is crazy. How many people do you have reviewing the reports?
About five.
I think you might be overworking them
Nah, we only do like 10 reports a day each on average
I've reported someone from about 5 mins but it's still showing me "Submitting report" ..
Uh, username?
I'll send it to you privately.
Update, which may be relevant to other users:
It seems that for some unknown reason, the website does not work in Syria, and a VPN fixed this issue. So please bear this in mind if it also doesn't work for you.
Keep up with this good work!
Thank you and all involved for your hard work!
Have you thought about promoting your project on Linkedin? A lot of cheaters post their "achievements" on Codeforces there, looking for placements, job interviews and status. I think there could be some impact, cheap effort-wise, especially if you target the largest cheating segment of the Codeforces audience, e.g. through reposting by indian CP or general IT influencers.
More awareness that there is a cheater database, especially on the platform where "achievements" are posted -> fewer incentives to cheat.
I think there is a problem with the database, when I try to report a user they tell me they are already marked as cheater, but when I search for them they aren't.
Also, I suggest there being a contest-based report, I mean user X cheated in contest Y, and then it gets sent to the setter of the contest to remove this cheaters, because in the current system, if someone cheats once and get reported, when they cheat again no one will be able to report them again because they are already marked...
Another suggestion is to remove cheaters after a year of when they cheated or something (it doesn't seem fair someone like chromate is still marked as a cheater)