Several days ago, when I was participating in Code Chef March Challenge 2020, I found this announcement here:

CodeChef gives cash prizes to the top 2 global contestants, so, does "double the number of prizes" apply to cash prizes as well?

With this doubt, I sent an email to CodeChef, and received this:

When I got this reply, I was at rank 3. Since he said "The number of cash prizes will be double", which sounded like top 1~4 will get cash prizes, I thought I didn't need to optimize my solution in order to win the cash prize.

After the final ranking was out, I was still rank 3, so I sent another email to confirm that I would get the cash prize, but this time the reply was different:

This time, he said "The cash prize will not get doubled", which is completely different from the first reply. What's more, these two replies are from the same person!

I asked him why he said "The number of cash prizes will be double", but he asked me to provide a screenshot:

I certainly have the screenshot, as you can see above. So I provided the screenshot, and here are his replies:

He said "When the contest was on, was it mentioned anywhere on the website that this is applicable on the cash prize?", but I can infer it from "This is applicable across all category winners". Perhaps "all category" is ambiguous, but I have asked him for confirmation.

I know this could be a careless fault, I'm not eager for the money, but his attitude — "Was it? Not right? No further discussion" — annoyed me, so I sent him one more email for a reasonable explanation, and this is his final reply:

Do you think this is a reasonable reply?

UPD: Glad that CodeChef replied to me, I do accept that apology, also we had put aside some misunderstanding between us. So I feel good now, thanks CodeChef for a quick reply this time.