The Long contest at codechef has been a success due to its challenging status but of late during the last 2 competitions , I found out that a lot of lot of people asked the questions as it is on websites like stackoverflow, stackexchange, topcoder and codeforces while the contest was still on . Nevertheless everyone knows that one could get a whole lot of good answers in these websites and because of that 500 people more view that post within 1 day or so . This really pisses those who do by themselves . Therefore, the admins should have a look at this issue because its growing exponentially with every competition and could well diminish the hard work put up by the psetters and testers and its integrity.After all there are whole bunch of solutions available after the competition then why do they need to cheat during the 10 days?
I have also seen several questions on Stackoverflow.com related to the live contest on Codechef.
One example : integer overflow in matrix exponentiation ā This contains the exact base matrix that I constructed for CHEFWD (Sept 2012). The question was asked on Sep 8 2012. (I might be mistaken)
This is very annoying. I was going to comment, that it is a problem from live contest and shouldnāt be answered, but someone else did it before me.
I donāt think Codechef can do anything about it. Cheating is unfortunate, but impossible to prevent.
So it is best to just ignore it.
I, too, have came across some questions on stackoverflow and stackexchange that are EXACTLY the codechefās problem question, but, with minor changes in the statement, maybe in the hope people wouldnāt notice itā¦
But, in fact, with such an awesome work from the problem setters and testers and with the best editorials Iāve ever read available after the contest, thatās not the way to go if you want to have a successful participation in CC long contestsā¦
From my own experience:
I became friends with one person who joined the FB page and is also more or less at the same level of expertise as I am (probably a bit better :)) ), but I can say that only speaking about the problems and literally ādiggingā trough websites like cplusplus allowed me to increase my expertise A LOT and did it in a way that no other website could do! Once again, thanks to the community 
@everyone who googles for solutions: Trust me, you can get happy if you are provided with an answer for your question and get an extra AC, but seeing yourself progressing and passing from solving only 1 problem (like I used to do) to being able to solve around 2/3 more consistently and learning new ideas on your own is MUCH MUCH more valuable!
And regarding the problems you were unable to solve during the live contest, if you read the editorials along with setterās/testerās solutiions and try to implement them on your own you will gain a lot more
This community is doing an excellent job, all we have to do, either as contestants or setterās or testerās is seize it and hope that it stays up for many more years to come 
Also, successful participation in codechef is being able to solve a problem that you were previously unable to solve!! A tip: if you read editorials carefully, you will see that there are usually around 1-2 problems that are simply implementation related and that require only some statement understanding and careful implementation!! Do those on your own and you will gain more confidence for future contests and tackling harder problems!
There are no shortcuts
Bruno
My opinion is that cheating is the way to hellā¦
First of all one have to realize why is he/she doing contest programming. You can cheat in Codechef long contests, there is a lot of time, but on the other hand short contests are more important. Not only those on CodeChef, but others as well - Google Code Jam, Facebook Hacker Cup, TopCoder SRMs and TopCoder Openā¦
Iām angry for a while when I find that someone is cheating, on the other hand I know, that Iāll always beat such coder in short contestā¦
At first Codechef had linked all of us with a great platform to learn many unknown things with respect to Algorithm theory as well as their implementation.I believe that if any one asked the questions of Live Long contest in the Knowledge sharing websites then it will surely not going to help that person in any way because getting the better rating post to the competition will give him a pleasure of achievement in terms of Numeralās but not in terms Knowledge.At first he must realize for what sake he had joined in the Community whether it is for improve his Knowledge along with rating or to just to improve his rating with out any Knowledge improvementā¦One thing i can really say if any body had cheated and obtained a good rating it will surely last for very less days but if any body learned from contest to contest then today his rating may be low but one day it will surely improve and will last for Long daysā¦
So itās up to the contestant to decide which path to prefer.And i strongly believe that change must come from a Contestantā¦
@everybodyā¦ I dont actually get what you are saying here. If one doesnt know, how to solve a problem, whats wrong in googling about it to know how to approach such a kind of problem? Its after all, increasing knowledge as you keep on knowing more and moreā¦ Whenever you are faced with a problemā¦ you obviously google it to know a better algorithmā¦ Isnt it the sole aim of Long Contests so that people simultaneously learn and contestā¦
Whats wrong in knowing the approach , algorithm and then implementing it by yourself,
by writing codeā¦ and submitting to the judge to know whether you did it right? I personally learnt a lot through these contests, especially long contestsā¦ Thank you very much Codechefā¦ Whatever knowledge and skills I have gained in programming ,most of it is due to codechef.
Chill out dude.There is nothing wrong in that, but in many cases, some users were found indulged in malpractices. More here Misbehaviours in May Challenge to be reported here - general - CodeChef Discuss
and few more existing threads are there. Please donāt take out a buried thread and topic back to live. Youāre okay to google for the ideas man.
one last questionā¦ so , is a new algorithm not a new idea ?
Yes, why not. Donāt think about others, you learned something while searching on the internet? Yes, then good. Those blindly copying codes do not learn, and the motto of these discussions was to reduce such incidents.
Hi All, we understand your concerns regarding the decorum of the monthly contests. Hence, weād like you all to contribute and help us maintaining it by reporting any CodeChef account involved in such malpractices. Weāve already mentioned it in our rules for any ongoing contest that any individual found indulged in such practices will be banned from the platform without any prior intimation. So, if any of you come across such accounts feel free to report to us at feedback@codechef.com. We will take appropriate action against such accounts.
@admin : Why donāt you run MOSS- A System for determining the similarity of programs or Plagiarism , after every long contest? Quite Efficient tool, there is no way cheaters can āby-passā MOSS?
@ritesh_gupta - a brute force over 75000 submissions will amount to O(75000^2) calls to moss. Intelligent pruning may reduce it, but we believe that there are more important things to be done for the community than to try and find people who are harming themselves and not reaping the benefits that the platform has to offer.
@admin there should be an agreement and/or manual that users should read before the contests. A lot of users, mostly new users think that itās ok to ask for help in the comment sectionā¦ And some of them even give hints after solving the problemā¦ The comments are turned into discussions regarding test cases, etc, etcā¦ This behaviour only motivates other users to do the same, every month these types of situations are becoming more frequent.