Help us identify cheat solutions in Cody
Cody is a useful tool to practice MATLAB skills not only by solving the problems but also learn from each other’s solutions. Sometimes you see subpar solutions that are cheats and hacks. With the flagging feature we released recently, you can help us identify solutions that administrators, including Community Advisory Board members, can review and delete.
How to flag?
Flag Options - Only available on solutions
13 Comments
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What a great idea, many thanks. However, I get an error message when I try it!
Hi Mark,
Could you give me some further info so I can troubleshoot this issue?
- Are you using incognito mode on your browser, by any chance? - Is this error happening for every solution you try to flag, or just specific ones?
Could you log out and log back into Cody, and try again?
Hi Arunika,
Thanks for the suggestions.
No, I'm not using incognito mode; I'm using Firefox for Android on a Galaxy S20.
I get the same problem on multiple solutions, and logging out and back in again hasn't helped.
I'll try to remember to try on a desktop browser in case the issue is limited to the mobile browser.
Regards,
Mark
Hi Arunika,
Just to follow up on this again. It seems to be an issue with Firefox for Android. I can flag solutions fine in a PC web-browser and in Chrome for Android. Perhaps its ad-block related? I'll investigate further and report back.
Regards,
Mark
Sorry to keep posting on this thread, but just to note that it now no longer works on my phone on Chrome for Android either. I can't work out why neither Firefox nor Chrome mobile browsers work. I have turned off all ad-blocking, logged out and back into Cody, restarted the phone etc. but still not working. I hope you can work out what is going wrong!
(Edit) Now it's not working on my PC browser either. I get the "Server temporarily unavailable" error on all platforms.
Hi Mark,
Thank you for following up on this issue and getting back to us with details. It does seem very strange - I was not able to reproduce the issue with my Android for either Chrome or Firefox (I'm using a Samsung Galaxy A02S). It will be difficult to investigate it further for mobile devices if I am not able to reproduce it.
As for the PC browsers - we could do some further debugging if you have the time. Could you please try to flag this specific cheat solution?https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/cody/solutions/1706233
I can check in our logs more specifically to track what happens and investigate further once you try to flag it.
Again, thank you for working with us on this to help us figure out what's going wrong.
Hi Arunika,
Sorry that I’ve not followed up for a while, but I’m still unable to flag hack answers. I still get the “server is temporarily unavailable” error. This problem occurs over different devices and with different browsers on those devices. I hope that you can get to the bottom of why it’s not working for me!
Regards,
Mark
Hi Mark,
Just following up on this. We have identified a possible cause for this and fixed it now. You should be able to flag solutions now. Please let me know if you still face any issues.
-Arunika
Hey Mark,
I'm sorry to hear that you're still facing issues with flagging - I am looking into it currently, and I have a few candidates for plausible causes.
Could you confirm what URL you are trying to reach Cody through?
Is it like "https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/cody/" or like "https://se.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/cody/", or "https://uk.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/cody/", etc.? It would be helpful if you could confirm what regional URL you are using to reach Cody.
-Arunika
Could you try again to see if you are running into any issue? We had intermittent issues with our infrastructure yesterday.
If it would be possible to include a check from a shared resource, it would be easier to prevent common methods to cheat. Overwriting assert and using regexp to execute code are hardly ever valid solutions. I would expect the vast majority to be basically those two hacks.
Thank you for the suggestion. We are going to continue to work on functionality to prevent common hacks.
Something that I've seen used before and personally think to be useful is creating a separate test case that analyzes the submitted solution to make regexp and assert (plus other functions used to break test cases) don't appear:
%
functions={'!','feval','eval','str2func','str2num','regex','system','dos','unix','perl','assert','fopen','write','save','setenv','path','please'};
assessFunctionAbsence(functions, 'FileName', 'solution_name.m');
