Making such submission sprees has helped my code break its average, so I can’t complain if others are doing the same.
Change the Queue Priority from FIFO
Let default priority be x. On a submission, that priority will be assigned to that submission and the priority of the contestant will decrease to say, x-1.
The lost priority will be regained by 1, say a minute or 5.
Aging for submissions with very low priority.
This will be good for people who just came in, but have queue already blocked by others.
@admin : I think allowing only one submission every 5-15 minutes for a particular problem is a good idea . That will also save CodeChef some money , because challenge problems submissions take much more time to execute than other problems and reduction in amount of submissions will mean savings for CodeChef which it can use to give more prizes , haha .
I would also suggest avoiding such Challenge problems which encourages the participants to make multiple submissions for the hope of getting higher scores by chance.
@admins you should really consider extending the contest with some time because the judge is taking more than half hour for a submission - and probably close the submission for the challenge problem -
@Balajiganapath : Everybody is doing the same thing. I even saw you . And if codechef team limits submission to single per 2-5 mins as you mentioned above then nobody’s going to do challenge problem
I think the scoring criteria should be changed. More stress should be provided on scoring criteria from next time. Scores are varying randomly in this problem. So let the people enjoy!
Codechef should provide few more hours in this contest for new users who are very last in the submission queue.
We have restricted the allowed number of submissions to 1 every 180 seconds for a user. Hopefully this is a fair restriction and can reduce the load on the server.
@admin
Making global limit for all submissions (even 10-15 seconds) is very bad for short contests.
IMHO the only thing to do is to restrict gap between submissions of challenge problems to say 30 or even 60 seconds. Then such situation will not happen again.
Actually this time due to nature of challenge problem I made 10 tabs with submit page and when I do some change in the solution I submit it 10 times (from each opened tab) to see what it is actual average score
No doubt it is interesting, however, it has become very difficult to attempt the other problems as the feedback time for each submission is now over 30 minutes.
This would at least slow down the flood of submissions of the same code. This would also help in the short contest since there were penalties in some prior short contests on codechef for multiple submissions of the same code due to server error. They can keep the hash(MD5/SHA1) of a participant’s last submission for a problem and check against that. If the last submission is within 5/15 minutes and the hash matches the last submission, the submission should not be accepted.
@admin it holds for short contest too? Typically I forget to remove public modifier from my class, that leads to compilation error. I will need to wait 30 seconds for next try now?
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. And if codechef team limits submission to single per 2-5 mins as you mentioned above then nobody’s going to do challenge problem 
