Many a time have I seen people posting problems and asking for solutions on this website. Sometimes, if I feel like, I tend to help them out. Yesterday, for the first time in my life, I experienced something disgusting.
I was browsing through the feed and I noticed a question. I read it. It felt kind of easy to me. So, I fired up my Sublime and prepared a solution, which worked. Obviously, I didn’t want to completely spoil the questioner, so I voluntarily didn’t include the complete solution.
Feeling glad to help, I pasted my code to Ideone and shared a link as a response and provided links to some other resources that might help solve the rest of the problem. As it turns out, I committed a grave mistake!
Few minutes later, I found out that my responses along with few other really helpful ones have been flagged and removed. Reason being, the question was from an ongoing contest in a different website, I never heard of. I feel sorry to say that this implies that I’ve taken part in this awful act of plagiarism myself!
Today again, I see another question in the discussions, which seems solvable. I would like to help. But, before that most importantly, I would really appreciate if anyone could just share some methods, using which I would be able to know whether the questions I respond to are from ongoing contests.
Hope this topic helps other users too. Thank you very much.
These types of questions are usually asked by beginners.
Suggested Solution : Whenever an user with participation in less than 10 live contest asks a question, it goes to moderator for review.
Due to other works, if it is overload for moderator, I believe many codechef users would agree to voulnteer for the same.
Simply ask that guy to post the source !! Its also a good habit to post source of question when asking ! I never respond to questions without proper source, if the guy doesn’t post the source it means its from ongoing contest
Well a girl asked me to solve a problem on Quora. It was hard but I solved it in minutes(men will be men…), suddenly I remembered this post and I asked her for the link…
Guess what? I did not get the link
honestly if someone asks me solution, i will comment solution without caring its from ongoing contest or not, because it will not affect my rating, because people who generally ask are 3 star or 2 star, its their loss not mine, i will always benefit from solving question. and everyone here should remember that to reach upto 2100 + rating you have to figure out solution on your own, no one will help you. i might sound a little selfish, but yeah every new coder must know that cheating in contest will not gain you anything. also asking resources is ok, but solve on your own, that is for your benefit.
Yes @anon55659401 , that truly is an amazing trick. The concept of bit value and the application of the amazing property of xor really is something to keep up one’s sleeves. Thank you once again @ssjgz for teaching that trick. Thanks to @ssrivastava990 for bringing the question to the discussion, or else we wouldn’t have learned that trick.
