I have given up in this competition, Its clear genuine guys are not gonna get the justice they deserve , cant blame Zindi though but there needs to be better anti cheating mechanisms and this should be a learning lesson for them

I think we all know who it is. It’s Yisak, the former second-place guy on the Zindi leaderboard. He was recently banned from Zindi, and he thinks this is the way to get back at Zindi. 😂

I may sound like I’m talking too much against the platform, but honestly, Zindi still has a lot of work to do to combat situations like this properly.

When a competition is close to ending — especially within the last 5 days — there should be stricter participation controls. On major global competitive platforms like Kaggle and others, anti-abuse systems become much tighter near the end of competitions because that is usually when leaderboard manipulation, multi-accounting, metric exploitation, and suspicious submission patterns happen the most.

Seeing multiple brand-new accounts suddenly appear within hours of the deadline and instantly climb into top leaderboard positions naturally raises concerns among genuine participants who have invested weeks or months of research, experimentation, feature engineering, and model tuning into the competition.

This is not even about attacking any individual person. It is about protecting competitive integrity and maintaining trust in the platform ecosystem.

Some important measures Zindi seriously needs to consider for future competitions include:

• Restricting new registrations from joining during the final days of a challenge

• Stronger multi-account detection systems

• Device/IP/fingerprint monitoring for suspicious submission behavior

• Manual review of highly suspicious late-entry leaderboard jumps

• Better exploitation-resistant evaluation metrics

• Delayed public leaderboard updates near the competition deadline

• Stronger enforcement transparency when abuse is detected

Competitive ML platforms survive because participants trust that the playing field is fair. Once people begin to feel that leaderboard manipulation can happen unchecked, it discourages serious researchers, students, and teams from investing their time and effort into future competitions.

I still appreciate Zindi and the opportunities they provide to the African AI community, but constructive criticism is necessary if the platform wants to continue growing at a global standard.

Shalom !!!

MICADEE

and it keeps getting worse and worse

At this point this can be classified as a cyber attack..

Hi everyone - we understand that this action has caused concern and frustration, and we want to clarify a few points.

Over the past two weeks, the Zindi team conducted a detailed investigation into abnormal submission activity in this competition. The investigation did not rely on a single signal or assumption. We reviewed multiple independent indicators.

As a result of this investigation, several accounts were flagged for violations of the competition rules relating to coordinated activity and/or multi-account usage. These accounts have been disqualified.

To ensure fairness to all participants, any flagged user who believes they were incorrectly identified may appeal by submitting complete reproducible code used to generate their submissions within a deadline provided.

Maintaining a fair and trustworthy leaderboard is extremely important to us. We know that many members of the community rely on their Zindi rankings and competition history for job opportunities, career advancement, scholarships, collaborations, and professional credibility. Protecting the integrity of the leaderboard is therefore essential for the entire ecosystem and for participants competing in good faith.

We appreciate the community’s patience while reviews and appeals are handled.