Hey guys,
I know, a lot of you guys have been sending mails and concerns over it. A lot of good suggestions were given at discuss which I gave to @admin. A lot of you were worried about the progress, and asked me about it. At that time, I didnt have any concrete reply so I simple asked you to be patient - “we are looking into this issue.”
@admin thought a lot, and had a discussion with me along with @drpaveen to resolve this issue. I will include minutes-of-the-meet here.
Admin’s Initiation- @admin first explained to me why they applied the 0 rating rule. He said that there are a lot of people who made double accounts - submitting solutions from fake ones and submitting the final AC at the main one (perhaps to make their profile look good). Despite warnings to not to do so by @admin , they continued as no action (i.e rating drop) was happening. This cannot be encouraged! The agenda of the meeting decided was as follows-
- Discuss what to do about 0 rating people.
- Discuss about the rating penalties.
My Response: I understand the Point of View, but how well does this case represent cases up to national level? Just hearing this case, one would feel “They need very harsh punishments” , but if we look at other cases, we will see the punishment is too extreme. A case in point is the I/O template ones, where people claim that they got no reply.
Admin’s Response: Yes, we accept our fault regarding template cases. If theres any such case where templates were the reason of penalty, we will look into it and restore the rating at the earliest. This should not have happened. For these cases, we cannot rely on MOSS, manual intervention is needed. We will do everything we need to, to make sure these people get their ratings restored.
My opinion- If you have such a case pending, please forward the mail at help@codechef.com again so that its not missed out and speedy action is taken. @admin 's inbox has lakhs of mails which he might have to filter and read. Your little initiative can save you a lot of time, and will be convenient to @admin. The forwarded mail should contain all relevant parts, namely , Smruti’s mail saying you’re caught, and your replies. If was no reply from their side despite your timely presentation of arguments, they will immediately look into your case.
The next part was, about punishment.
My Point- The reduce rating to X is extremely harsh than reduce rating by X. Given that any 2 instances, over an indefinite period of time, are enough to reduce rating to 0 , this model can pose multiple problems and dissatisfaction especially if users arent getting reply to their plagiarism mails and/or if genuine users are punished.
Admin’s Point- He explained to me various factors about his decision and what prompted him to do so. Some factors discussed were, their need to punish regular cheaters severely (the punishment must dissuade them). We discussed other models like those followed by CF. Some constraints were like- they need to avoid frequent recalculation of ratings for timely and speedy update of ratings after contest (which gives another constraint on “trade-off between rating updation and time given to user to reply back with their justification” [if CF model were to be followed])
My Argument- The rating of change to X must be fixed. It should ideally be “reduce by” a fix value than “reduce to” 0. For those with 0 rating, we can give them a ‘boast’ like +800 or +1000 to allow them a sensible recovery. Reduce rating to 0 also encourages multiple accounts.
A detailed discussion then followed. Admin said that currently users are sticking to their old accounts despite 0 rating, and inquired me about it. I responded that its because I assured them that we will look into it, and that they believe @admin will give a fair solution in the end. Admin asked then, why in my opinion, reduce by X doesnt encourage multiple accounts- to which I cited that “A user has affection for his hard work he did to build his profile. A -500 wont cause him to throw it away his account. But a reduce to 0 means he is better starting off with a new one, as it will take him almost half a year to just reach 1500 at a optimistic rate of +100-130 per contest.” Admin seems to have taken the suggestion well 
Final Consensus- We decided that the punishment could be changed to something like "For first contest, reduce rating by 500. Increase it per contest the user is caught in future ( upto a max of -800 per plagiarism contest). If after that he reaches 0 rating, then he is on his own. This was, very agreeable to me as well, as its a lot better than reduce to 0 at very 2nd instance, allows for a possible recovery as well. For the users currently at 0 rating, @admin will give something like +K to allow a possible recovery. Exact numbers will be decided by @admin. Do forward your previous mails to them if you are one of the users belonging to this case! For people with double account, its entirely on mercy of @admin. This is one practice he severely wants to discourage. He expresses his hope that this instance will cause such things not to be repeated in future.
We also discussed various measures we can take regarding no reply to plagiarism mails. The problem is, the workload of it is too much for a few people to handle, as they get thousands of mails regarding this topic. He had thought over it and gave his suggestion. He proposed to make this step public, by a thread on discuss or some portal on codechef website. This will increase transparency. Anyone caught will be required to give arguments and justification there, and he hopes that the community will extend whatever help it could to assist @admin in discharging of this duty.I responded positively, as it makes the process transparent. At last, admin assured more community and/or mod involvement in their process so that things go smoothly for the community. He expressed how important the community and ethics are for them, and with that we concluded the discussion.
A blog will be put up by them soon to communicate the final decisions.
This was the crux of it. It wasnt as short as I described above, a lot of discussion, arguments and concerns (which you guys sent me) were exchanged to get to the most constructive solution. I am just telling the crux of it- the actual discussion lasted for over half an hour XD.
also you can check my other submissions and you can see can easily notice that i often use 
