Banned on LC Contest 501 for using public code from GFG. 2400+ Guardian / ICPC NAC Competitor needing advice
Hello everyone,
My account (concl) was just hit with a contest ban on Weekly Contest 501. I've been on LeetCode for over 4 years with a 2400+ peak rating, and I'm a competitive programmer who competed at the 2026 ICPC North American Championship (NAC).
I opened a support request explaining the situation transparently, but it was just closed/denied with a generic automated template with no reason given.
So what happened was for problem 4, I needed to implement all pairs shortest paths, and to save time, I used publicly available code from GeeksForGeeks (their material is pretty bad, honestly shouldn't have used it in the first place). For reference, my submission can be found here, and the code I used can be found here. I will note that I was a bit stupid in that I did not have to use this algorithm as I hallucinated thinking that running Dijkstra's on every vertex would be too slow.
I'm not sure exactly what got me banned from WC 501, but it seems like I may have been flagged for plagiarism for having similar code as other contestants since there could be multiple people that used this public template.
I didn't collaborate with anyone, use Discord cheating groups, or use LLMs or any other clanker assistance. I definitely have the technical capability to write this code, I just used a public template for a standard utility sub-component, which is explicitly allowed on other CP platforms like Codeforces. I'm currently at rank 26603 (you can find it here) if anyone wants to check my code replay.
Does anyone know how to escalate past an automated support agent to get an actual LeetCode admin to look at my case?
Thanks for any help or visibility.
Update: Since I am completely locked out of the LeetCode Discuss boards due to the ban, my teammate was kind enough to post an appeal on my behalf to get a manual review from an admin (I don't condone the glaze). If you want to help boost visibility on LeetCode's end, the thread can be found here: https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/8284879/false-positive-ban-appeal-for-concl-2400-g6cs/