Recently a user called @rohit_jere_rj has been active in this forum. He has posted some well-written and well-informed answers to various questions. Naturally many members, myself included, have upvoted his posts and accepted his answers.
Yesterday he answered another question (link) with an answer which seemed a bit off. The question asked for an implementation to a particular problem, but @rohit_jere_rj instead wrote another well-written description of the idea behind the problem. This was a bit odd, because if he knew how to solve it he could easily write a snippet and answer with that instead. So I Googled his answer, and voila, it was copied directly from a Quora post (link). Digging further, I realized that ALL of his well written answers were indeed ripped off Quora. When I pointed this out to him in the comments, he promptly deleted his answer.
His answer to What are things I should know before my 1st Contest? and How to get started on Codechef? is taken from here.
His answer to Which Programming language should I learn first? is taken from here.
His answer to How to prepare to win any coding contest? is taken from here.
I could go on, but I think I have made my point. Not once does @rohit_jere_rj cite his sources or give credit to the Quora answers in any way. As a sidenote, the users @newone123 and @johndavis1967 who have asked questions to which @rohit_jere_rj has answered both appear to be suspicious accounts.
But wait, @rohit_jere_rj must be a good coder, he has fully solved 662 practice problems, which is quite impressive. You may have guessed it already, he copied existing visible solutions and submitted them to get AC. Filter by language and check a few submissions below his, and you are bound to find the exact code he submitted. This also led to a ridiculous density of submissions. For example, from 08:45 PM to 08:47 PM on 26/09/16 he had solved 14 different problems! Interestingly, he was unable to solve a single problem in the April Cook-off.
So there we have it… an elaborate scheme to get karma, laddus and goodies from Codechef with minimum effort on one’s part. I would have mailed this to Codechef but then I decided that the other users needed to be aware of such activity, so I made this post.
Personally I feel that the reward system is very difficult to enforce fairly so it ought to be scrapped, but that is a different issue entirely.
@admin please take necessary steps against this user.
I can understand the benefit of copy pasting the answers on discussion forum to get karmas -> laddus -> Goodies. But just out of curiosity , is there any benefit of copy pasting the solutions to Practice Problems. As far as I know ( kindly correct me if I am wrong ) , there is no direct materialistic reward of any laddus or karma just for solving lot of Practice Problems, then why would one just copy paste the solutions to practice problems. Isn’t that the waste of time with zero benefits. I just wish to know what can be the intention(any ideas from your side regarding this )? Is green tick way that addicting?
On side note, such incidents just remind me that how our nation suffers from corruption.
Of course I also realized the same thing. I was wondering how come he wrote so good answers being 1 stars. This was wrong of him and he should have given the link to the source instead. Now we realise 1 more thing here. This is that people are not googling stuff and just asking popular questions for which you can find 100’s of answers.
He was unable to solve a single problem in the April Cook-off Exactly this thing made me think, this guy who is grey and wasn’t even able to solve simplest problem in codechef how can he advise people how to code?
The tactics he uses to farm karma are:
He asks people for email ID and sends solution to problems which I doubt can he even solve? Link
Copies Solution from random sites and posts it in discuss section, as if someone who is asking the question hasn’t searched it in google if the intention of the question asker was to get the problem AC, i guess he wouldn’t have asked the question itself, he could have copied and pasted from google. Today for example someone asked regd, SPOJ problem PGAIN, he posted some link to solution than explaning it Link
Regarding the number of problems he has solved using copy pasting, I doubt he is targeting to be the max submitted coder in codechef and beat @rajat1603, completely childish acts of his.
I request @admin please make change to karma system because when a newbie joins codechef their main intention is to farm karma than help people genuinely, and newbies farm for karma to get codechef laddu and nothing else, I suggest only people having at least karma above some threshold should have the ability to upvote and post content in discuss section, because people are misusing upvoting ability by opening fake accounts to farm karma. @marshalroxx and @ardentcoder are few. And Karma farming increases from 3rd week of month, I guess Laddus should also be distributed on basis of how a person has been able to help genuinely than through karma farming.
@neilit1992 You ended up tagging the wrong Rajat, this guy barely has 5 submissions. Clicked on his name out of curiosity to know the highest number of problems solved. It’s @rajat1603 (Great Work btw mate).
On a lighter note @meooow, you made a Karma Farming in the name of “Karma Farming”.
I saw one of his answers to my question, where he posted the answer by extracting the content from quora and gave the same link at the end of the post (i thought it was on a courtesy, he provided the actual source of the
information), but removed the link and provided another link later (go through the revisions he made). Post Link
The reason why i have asked for the help in my post is that i can get the information by simple search on google which mostly gives an opinionated information which i don’t want, rather the forums like this has the actual people who worked on algorithms and design the solutions to get AC. But people like him, who haven’t solved a problem in Competition suggesting other to take path doesn’t sound good.
I agree that Knowledge is not limited to a person by his age or other factors, but at the end this is my opinion.
I really cannot say why someone would copy-paste-run 662 problems. It even sounds ridiculous. It can be that he is aiming for some record as @neilit1992 says. It did lend some credibility to his account for sure. Perhaps having an active Codechef profile would create a good impressions for him in some scenario, I don’t know.
