Recently, there were some blogs about cheating in contests. And many users had a discussion about why they cheated, how they cheated, and so on. We spent too much time catching just a few "found" cheaters (the number of cheaters is much more than we found).
The cheaters are shameful. They broke the contest rules, and made us spend a lot of time finding him to maintain the fairness of these competitions. But they just thought gaining rating is fun, though the ratings weren't achieved through their strength. They thought of competitive programming as interesting games because they didn't parcitipate any offline competitions. They don't need this skill.
I saw some blogs on Luogu about problems in a running Codeforces contest before. However, the academic climate of Luogu was good. The users didn't give solutions to them who asked and they reported about the blogs to the admins. The admins finally deleted the blogs.
I think the academic climate is the most important thing of competitive programming. Cheating groups were cheating themselves. To maintain the fairness, we can just automatically ban / or send warnings to cheaters but not discuss (like AtCoder). We need to solve the problem from the root. I believe Codeforces is an upward programming community. Start with yourself, don't give solutions to other people is the best way (and report the cheating actions). Because cheaters can't be all found. "It's a road that leads into a swamp. And we may not get out of it."
Why there are many posts complaining about cheating?
If you do contests to improve, just ignore these cheaters. They may affect your rating, but you do contests to learn and improve, not for rating. Just keep going until you're better than the best cheater, than no one can affect you anymore.
All right.
Well actually cheaters don’t affect most people. People cheat because they are weak. In fact, most cheaters are just cheating for like div.2 C and D. No matter how they exchange codes, they won’t get a really high rank anyway.
can you give me some advices please?... I'm weak, but don't know what to learn and when to study new algos/ when to pratice problems....
Ask Kevin114514.
Exactly. There are 2 types of cheaters.
Only the smart cheaters can affect your rank by atmost -10 if your rating is below 1400. After that, it will be negligible.
and the cheaters below your rank will give you positive rating delta by increasing your seed
I don't know exactly because I've never cheated or seen others cheating in the contest. But my opinion is similar to Habaxl,they don't really matter.Codeforces' contest is just practice.
Why is everyone complaining about cheating but no one is talking about that Codeforces' server has been vulnerable lately ?