I think the fact that people can just make a new account anytime they want and start posting or commenting makes it very "easy" to spam. I've had that opinion since quite sometime but didn't say anything but today something happened which makes me think that this is of extreme importance.
Commenting from a new unrated account is like saying stuff without consequences : When you've given a few contests and spent some time on your account then you have an identity. Making a new fake account is equivalent to wearing a mask.
Take for example today's incident-
So there's this blog on codeforces "Code For Athoy — Contest for Saving a Life". It's basically a contest announcement as well as a person asking for donations for a cancer patient.
Now on that thread I see an absolutely insensitive jerk, just look at the audacity of this person. Here's his comment
While banning unrated people won't end spamming completely it'd definitely reduce it, plus I don't think it'll be hard to implement. There's no reason for not banning them, after all, unless you haven't been a part of any rated contest, you're not really a part of the community anyway. I believe this one step would go a long way in reducing spam posts and comments to a great degree.
I sincerely hope that some day you will develop the courage to say this from your main account.
demoralizer come on!
Could I * be * anymore confused?
LanceTheDragonTrainer I see your end is near.
To be fair, I think most of us want to know his real account xD
He is red! that's for sure!!
I think he's orange.
I think they aren't a fake account.
How?? It is quite clear that is fake. Any counter argument that I may be missing??
Yup! I also agree they are fake accounts, similar to how your's account is a fake one too!
And yeah to all the upvoters what was the point of upvoting someone's comment commenting that this is fake id who is himself using fake id. Either you have more 10 fake ids or upvoters are really unique
he has 10 fake ids, this being one of those..
How you knew??
Kowalski analysis
that's my fake id
It won't stop spamming! They will give 3-4 contests just like you (and me) and keep spamming!!
And how to stop letting rotavirus post and comment ?
This is sad. I agree. Stop unrated accounts from commenting. stop rotavirus too.
and stop stealing my comment!
I too want to stop rotavirus. Our goal is same.
hi non-master
hi arrogant master.
at first, reach +114 contribution and then we will talk about my retiring from commenting
okay boomer.
Burns! XD
I'm +119 contribution AND master. Wanna talk with me?
(it didn't take much effort tbh, just 3 contests and a post about it)
I don't
I'm kinda glad I shut you up lol
Ok now I want to talk, Mr master
Now you can't talk as you have +100 contribution.
i had +114 which allows me to talk
no one cares about your contribution mr master!
*mrs international master
Are you the only female contestant to reach CF red ? I thought you were a guy lol
Ofc there are other grandmaster women
*grandmistress
I think rotavirus's comments are Very Entertaining.
To be fair, that's why I dragged rotavirus in this thread!
Lel, when I saw that blog I immediately thought of posting exactly the same comment :D
Just like this it is for sure not gonna be implemented; there are plenty of coaches, company representatives etc. They are probably 0.1% of unrated accounts, but still. However, a feature that I was long asking for — checkmark "publish anonymously" (with no impact on contribution, of course) in comments (and blogs?) — would help somewhat. It would reduce number of accounts created just to publish risky-humour or unpopular-opinion comments or show off with meaningless nicknames like tourist_orz etc. This can be further enhanced with, say, possibility to reveal your identity later if your joke was good and you want to show who is this talented comedian.
Another thing that might help is to not allow publishing comments/blogs until your first contest or N hours/days since registration, whichever comes first. Plenty of new users are so excited about becoming a part of this community that write "hello" in the blogs/comments, get massively downvoted and demoralized in the end. Also this will to some extent eliminate blogs "How to solve this problem on AtCoder/Leetcode/etc" written by just-registered users.
You had me at "demoralized in the end"
Or people should stop being little p****** about contribution and say what they want to say...
They should, but they (we) won't. In the end, what is the end goal for having contribution on CF? I usually consider this as some sort of "credibility" of a person, but we all know memes and good sarcasm get way more upvotes than helpful meaningful comments.
https://codeforces.com/blog/entry/65078
https://codeforces.com/blog/entry/61905?#comment-459600
I have made a severe and continuous lapse in my judgement.
"not allow publishing comments/blogs until N hours/days since registration" -> doesnt work. People can create multiple accounts today and use it in future whenever required.
I wanted to suggest "comment as anonymous" approach as well. Personally I dont appreciate people hiding their identity, but some people want it, and this solution seems to tackle that (much like Quora, if I remember).
I believe if someone is really determined to do so, he/she will. Multiple accounts, VPN, fake IDs... but the harder tricking the system becomes, the fewer people will do it.
Rated people will be nice. You sure?
Inb4 no more SRM reminders.
I do see your point. But here's the thing, I'm not gonna use Bayes' theorem to justify my point but I believe most of us can intuitively "see" whether more spammers are rated or unrated.
"Inb4 no more SRM reminders." -> I am not sure about the exact number, but there seems to be O(1) number of accounts which did not do contest but their comments and blogs are valuable (some companies, coaches etc). These people can write an email to Mike and get special privilege.
Commenting from a new unrated account is like saying stuff without consequencesWelcome to the internet
Well I'm not being a preacher but here's the thing, just because something happens quite often, doesn't mean that it should continue to happen(for example long submission queues).
How about forbidding comments of unrated accounts that have negative contribution as well? Maybe under -10 or something, so that we dont lose the good comments from unrated accounts
Actually that would still let people make a new account any time they want and reset their contribution to 0.
dantrag above proposed a solution which makes a little more sense, new users can't post or comment till N days after joining. I think this ALONG WITH your solution of filtering out people with negative contribution might be very effective.
Don't take away ability to post blogs and comments from my boy snarknews
I believe there are only a countably finite number of such accounts. And as others have already pointed out, they could easily be provided special access.
I might be ignorant, but is there any legitimate reason for letting unrated accounts post and comment? I know there are unrated organization accounts like Yandex and JetBrains, but those guys can just reach out to Codeforces directly and get verified/special accounts or something.
Other than that, the only other types of unrated accounts I see are trolls, who can be funny sometimes but most of the time are just stupid. And it wouldn't be hard to gain access to posting privileges if unrated accounts were blocked from posting. Just have them do a contest and expose themselves as a gray or whatever other color they are. Trolls probably won't go through the hassle of doing a contest just to post.
From what I've noticed lately a lot of gray and unrated users pollute the comments section with stupid comments or memes or copy paste code. Maybe a good idea is for some posts to have two comment sections: one for unrated and gray users where anyone can comment and one for others where gray and unrated users can only read.
I think that this is now more relevant than ever. Some unrated account just spammed all of Recent Actions by commenting some random stuff on Errichto's posts. Although I did find it fun to reread the comments under these posts while scrolling to downvote that comment, this is really a problem that should be fixed.
That's not even to mention the homophobic and racist content of those comments, which I think (or at least hope) we can agree don't belong on this platform.
If you want an example of the comments you can see this one.
I didn't even see this until after making a similar post, but please this needs to be implemented. This is getting ridiculous.
Yeah, I think that another problem of CodeForces blogs is that as soon as a blog falls out of Recent Actions it's forgotten forever. And having someone write a script to spam Recent Actions certainly isn't helping.