A fellow person of culture!
Ling Ling 40 hours.
Why are you not practicing?
Long challenges were very fun when I was a beginner. There was no time pressure and I could learn topics that I didnāt know of before and solve problems involving those topics.
Now that HackerRank has stopped their week of code contests (and all other contests, I miss HackerRank), it seems like only CodeChef has this unique format.
Ouch , I should be :ā(
uno reverse card
Why arenāt you practising, fellow sacrilegious human.
amaaazing
I just realized weād sound so dumb/random to people who donāt get the references 
Ya, Iām also little behind on violin practice, havenāt touched it for a year.
Me to brah! Me tooā¦
Very true. I remember participating in their university codesprints and weeks of code .
Itās pretty sad that now they mostly just host company hiring challenges . Hope codechef continues long forever! 
Little is a bit of an understatement there ,buddyš¤£
Iām pretty behind in my guitar practise too.
After watching Davie504 , RobScallon, Jared, The Doo and Twoset, I feel the urge to say random things like O.M.G bass :3
Happy practising to all of ya! Be it instruments or code 
Exactly.
I practice CodeChef Long challenge due to the same reason. It gives an opportunity to learn a lot more than what the question is about. Like some great philosophier said, āIts not about getting the answer, its about things you learn along the journey of getting the answer.ā
Ignore the cheaters, focus on self learning. Use every opportunity to your best.
The practice section too serves the purpose
There are plenty of venues for short coding contests already. Racing/competitiveness appeals only to certain personality types, and tends to be slanted towards young people. There is much pleasure to be had in mulling over a problem for a while and trying alternate approaches, and this more accurately reflects real-world coding.
Please do not drop the long contests, CodeChef.
Completely agreed with you @mcsinyx . People who are only focus on rating can go elsewhere. Long challenge is the best place to learn and improve skill with good work/life balance. Long life to Codechef Marathon
.
This is a discussion that has happened multiple times, right from the start of the contest, more than 10 years ago. And everything thatās to be said has been said and debated upon multiple times, even in this thread. The bottom line being: the Long contest is here to stay despite there being some disadvantages. The advantages far outweigh them.
No worries and keep on learning 
No the same argument cannot be applied to short contests, there is little time to cheat in short contests and cheaters have less time to modify directly copied codes or ask in online forums. This make long contests the only sweet spots for cheaters.
Ya Everule on codeforces
No I wonāt say anything, but I will show.
If there is something you would like to report about an ongoing contest, you can send it to help@codechef.com, and if there is enough evidence, we will punish the culprits. But it does not give you the right to post it on a public forum where the information could help others.
If you do want to alert the community about it, because you canāt or donāt want to spend time getting concrete evidence, then sure, go ahead, but make sure that you donāt post anything which will be useful for others in the contest. Or just wait and post it after the contest is over.
Truly, I am giving this Long challenge after some time. Before when I used to give Long Challenges, it was not in a sincere goal of performing good but rather just solve those which I can. And if you try to solve it sincerely then this challenge is awesome. Reading multiple article on implementation, theory and optimisation techniques is really fun when you donāt even know if you can ever pass with current approach or not. It teaches one, a short competitive programmer that changing approach is crucial.
The increase in amount of cheating in Long Challanges cant be stopped most people are inetelligent enough not to caught by codechef moss detector , there is only one way out to make long challanges unrated or stop conducting Long Challanges
Even I recently started Coding and in Short contest mostly i could only do 2 ques. and that too within 1.5 hrs but what next even i Know with left 1.5 Hrs i canāt solve 3rd ques. an i leave it.
But here in Long challenge I try until i could figure out the answer. Not only that But many times people who donāt have enough confidence in solving DIV - 1 (like me) simply Donāt even try to do the problem but when the no. of submissions increases you start to think. Hey wait I guess can also solve this Problem, it might be something i missed.
In this particular contest Most Difficult to understand problem (in DIV2 ) is REBIT previously i just left not even trying to understand. But as no. of submissions started to grow i try harder to at least understand the problem. And at last i finally understood the question statement, Well its still a long journey to solve it. But since thereās still lot of time left i might be able to solve it.
But Given the same set of question in short contest I could only solve 3(at best).
So both have there importance just you try to be fair.