Excessive cooldowns

[Swistakk]

Hello,
I started solving some problems here, but I am experiencing unusually high cooldowns between submissions. If I solve some problem and I want to move on to the next one I often see a "you must wait 8 minutes before submitting this problem" (or some other similar duration) even though I never submitted anything to that problem. Moreover if I submit something and it turns out to be incorrect then I need to wait a few minutes before I can try again (rather than under a minute for a first wrong submission). I understand that if I were to try submitting one problem tens of times then increased cooldowns may make sense, but having a cooldown to problem X after submitting a correct answer to problem Y doesn't make any sense and I am also unusually highly punished for any wrong submissions from the fact that I solved some problems earlier. With these cooldowns, even if I had all 875 answers ready now, submitting them would probably take me at least a week if I was doing that 24h a day. Current behavior clearly seems like an unintended one

[Swistakk]

This is getting ridiculous...

I am just solving ~10 problems per day and averaging probably ~1 wrong submission per problem. I am now often facing times when I have two answers waiting to be submitted. With these increasing cooldowns I am changing my estimation to submitting correct answers to the whole problemset from a week to probably more than a year.

[jaap]

There are limits to the rate of submissions because there are sites with lists of answers that people try to use to achieve a high ranking.

The cooldown periods do shrink again if you take a break from submitting. See also this older forum post.

[Swistakk]

I refuse to believe that solving 40 problems over the span of 4 days should lead to timeouts longer than an hour per submission and if this is intended behavior that will not change then I guess I will have to abandon that site cause at this point this is honestly infuriating and very demotivating. I started pinning problems to keep track of ones that I have already solved, but were not able to submit yet xd. It will also make it much harder for me to get into fastest solvers for new problems cause I either get it right on the first try or I have to wait over an hour to submit for the second time. A few years ago I solved first 42 problems within a day and I don't remember any issues like that. The guy from the cited thread mentions 2.5mins, which is nothing compared to over an hour

[hk]

Perhaps you could try some of the hardest problems. Sorting on difficulty is one of the options

[euler]

@Swistakk: Looking into it...

[euler]

@Swistakk: I can see that your wait times continue to increase (currently at 2 hours). You do seem to be an outlier and I have been analysing your data intensely. I am currently consulting with the admin team on possible changes, but as you can imagine any changes we make have far reaching consequences. So please be patient.

[Swistakk]

@euler: Thank you for your response, that is appreciated. I just wonder if anything regarding the timeouts algorithm was changed recently? I have friends who have solved hundreds of problems here (Radewoosh among others), very intensely at some moments too, and they say they never encountered anything of that sort and claimed that it seemed to them that submissions for problem X don't affect timeouts after submitting problem Y (while in my case they definitely do)

[hk]

As I said, use the wait time to try to solve a few problems with difficulty 100% or almost that.
The most difficult problems on Project Euler are mathematically more difficult than those on Codeforces, as far as I know.

[euler]

@Swistakk: I'd like to thank you for taking the time to raise this issue. In most cases, the wait times would have been activated as intended to deter unrealistic solve rates, but your solve history should not have triggered such an explosion of wait times; I wonder if this has impacted other outliers and instead of reporting it, they just left. So, after discussing this issue with the team I can let you know that I am currently making some changes to the way in which this whole process works. Needless to say, based on the way in which you have been solving problems you will probably never have any wait times at all. However, this is not a simple change to a couple of lines of code and may take some time to fully implement. But in the meantime, you may have noticed that your wait times have gone. Once again, thank you for alerting me and your patience, as I can imagine it must have been very frustrating seeing those crazy wait times accumulating.