Recently, on the ACC1 (Another Contest), there was a fairly high profile attempt of utilizing fake accounts.
While such attempts may be done partly for humor, the nature of the DMOJ contests (with their long open durations) means such behavior could completely destroy the usefulness of the ranking system. We reached out to the likely users (according to xiaowuc1 it was not too hard to identify who they were by reading their code), and they agree with us about the seriousness of their actions. Please see below for their message.
In fact, we would like to use this opportunity to encourage users who would like to compete at national levels (or higher) to add their real-world information onto the about pages of their profiles. Yes, this adds additional stress for doing the contest (due to feeling like being watched), but it's also an essential part of the contest process.
Hello DMOJ,
We wanted to apologize for cheating on Another Contest 1 (10/12/2018). We took
the contest as a team of 3 people with 3 computers on a fake account
(y0105vv49). We understand that this is very unsportsmanlike, as it directly
affects the rankings of real contestants taking the contest legitimately and
sets a bad example for other users. Some of us have previously been reprimanded
for this issue before, but we evidently failed to learn our lesson. We won't do
this again. If there's any contributions to the DMOJ community we can make to
make up for this, such as setting a contest, we'd be eager to volunteer our
time.
Andrew He, Kevin Sun, Yinzhan Xu
