@Jyrki On a more positive note, speaking of reeling them in hook, line and sinker, where can I learn more about your pearl diving expedition? (I'm also interested in rediscovering the other sharp joking MSE baiting questions - it would be nice to collect them for nostalgia. Did anyone save any?)
@BillDubuque @darijgrinberg @Jack: Here is proof that Firex Firexo is a cheater at contests: 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. Can you stop undeleting his/her PSQs, since a large fraction of them are cheating attempts?
If you have not done contest programming before, note that most contest problems come with sample test cases, which of course cheaters sometimes copy into their question. Obviously this does not count as context/effort.
@BillDubuque Sorry I didn't mean that you undeleted his/her PSQs, but you were participating in the discussion of cheating, so I thought you would want to be aware of this case.
He/she changed user name a few times as well, if I recall correctly, but I don't remember the previous ones.
@XanderHenderson Are you sure about that dupe target ? In Anne's question the exponentiated term converges to 1 instead of diverging. That makes the question kind of trivial, but it doesn't seem to be a duplicate.
I'd recommend strongly to steer clear of talk about presumptions of cheating, which alludes to users, especially users not present.
On the general point, obviously plenty of clear cheating happens on the site, some small some large. Still a lot more happens in a gray-area where people have somewhat plausible deniability. In these case it can be a matter of luck (for lack of a better word) what happens. Claims that there is no cheating might be best ignored as they hardly can be serious.
There was another question which had the limit of $(1+1/n^2)^{1/n}$.
Arg... now I can't find it again! Grumble...
5 hours later…
user12692
9:12 PM
@user21820 It seems too late catch the first one. It is not an ongoing test anymore.
user12692
"Can you stop undeleting his/her PSQs, since a large fraction of them are cheating attempts?" I have not seen this user before. I cannot tell which one may be "cheating" except those identical to ongoing contests. Would you also suggest that the account of this user should be deleted by mod?
Why do we have a policy?
First and foremost: we believe that the responsibility for the integrity of an exam, contest, competition, etc. ultimately falls on the shoulders of the organizers.
That said, the Mathematics Stack Exchange community is not an island unto itself: rather we exist within...
user12692
According to Willie's post, contest problems seem to be mostly handled by moderators.
user12692
@achillehui: most users I've seen posting contest questions are at least smart enough to paraphrase the question so they are not a word-for-word identical copy of the contest question. So we already have to always make a little bit of judgement call (based on the timestamp etc.) — Willie WongSep 15 '14 at 9:31
As an aside, I quite despise PSQs which contain the phrase "thanks in advance" or some variation thereof. It comes off as "Thanks for doing my homework for me"
Why do we have a policy?
First and foremost: we believe that the responsibility for the integrity of an exam, contest, competition, etc. ultimately falls on the shoulders of the organizers.
That said, the Mathematics Stack Exchange community is not an island unto itself: rather we exist within...
