At this point, I think that just about everyone here is familiar with the recent series of blogs surrounding the case of Psychotic_D and his gang of cheaters, things which have been exposed here and by defnotmee in these two blogs (here and here) in more detail.

But what if I tell you that cheaters end up setting rounds on a regular basis too? What makes it even worse is that in some cases, these people use the goodwill of some of the coordinators for their own benefit without having any remorse for their actions, and here is one example in action which caught my attention as it made waves in some of the communities I'm in.

Background story

Cheating is more and more of a problem as shown by the fact that at almost any instance, there is at least one blog talking about a cheater or a cheating group, and this problem got worse now that cheaters can live stream solutions on various platforms.

The first notorious case of a cheater who set a round which came to my mind was the round where TimDee, someone who cheated multiple times according to this comment and the linked blog ended up being a co-author in the round (in fairness, judging from the editorial, 90% of the work wasn't done by him). I thought at first that this should be just a one off, right? Codeforces can't possibly let people who fraud their contests set rounds.

Oh dear, I couldn't have been more wrong

As the number of cheaters grew, more people started using various tricks to also fraud their way into problem setting, without respecting the current system, and I am going to show one case which stroke to my mind after having seen the discussions online. First, it is a known fact that many rounds are set based on official contests, with various degrees of quality, and what I will say here does not apply to these rounds.

While I believe many rounds are set by people based on their connections to coordinators rather than having waited in the queue, talked to coordinators and then have an actual round set up after some time (I have been involved in two such rounds and the process took about 1 year and many problem proposals in each of these, back in 2019 and 2020), nothing has been as worse as what I witnessed over the past couple of weeks. So let's present -2.71

Just about everyone who is somewhat more known must have received such messages over time, from various people who want to set rounds and have an easy path to getting it done. At the time, I thought he would simply just try to maybe team up with some more experienced problem writers and maybe have a round like that. Now, let's analyze his behavior during this year.

First, I had a series of messages with him where I reviewed a few of the problems, without the intention of actually coordinating him (I am not a coordinator here and also I have many other things I have to do anyways) only to then see his messages grow more and more absurd and dishonest. His initial motive according to his messages was to make Palestine proud of him before any unfortunate event happens given the ongoing conflict in the region, but going from this and turning it into a weapon to shame people into having him around is something completely different and unacceptable in my opinion.

Over the last few months, I saw his name pop out more and more and I started making some more research. One can notice here that a lot of his comments are about how he claims to be a pioneer as far as many aspects go