Running the contest

Team status

Under the Teams menu option, you can get a general impression of the status of each team: a traffic light will show either of the following:

• gray: the team has not (yet) connected to the web interface at all;

• red: the team has connected but not submitted anything yet;

• yellow: one or more submissions have been made, but none correct;

• green: the team has made at least one submission that has been judged as correct.

This is especially useful during the practice session, where it is expected that every team can make at least one correct submission. A team with any other colour than green near the end of the session might be having difficulties.

Clarification Requests

Communication between teams and jury happens through Clarification Requests. Everything related to that is handled under the Clarifications menu item.

Teams can use their web interface to send a clarification request to the jury. The jury can send a response to that team specifically, or send it to all teams. The latter is done to ensure that all teams have the same information about the problem set. The jury can also send a clarification that does not correspond to a specific request. These will be termed general clarification.

Handling clarification requests

Under Clarifications, three lists are shown: new clarifications, answered clarifications and general clarifications. Click the excerpt for details about that clarification request.

Every incoming clarification request will initially be marked as unanswered. The menu bar shows the number of unanswered requests. A request will be marked as answered when a response has been sent. Additionally it’s possible to mark a clarification request as answered with the button that can be found when viewing the request. The latter can be used when the request has been dealt with in some other way, for example by sending a general message to all teams.

An answer to a clarification request is made by putting the text in the input box under the request text. The original text is quoted. You can choose to either send it to the team that requested the clarification, or to all teams. In the latter case, make sure you phrase it in such a way that the message is self-contained (e.g. by keeping the quoted text), since the other teams cannot view the original request.

In the DOMjudge configuration under clar_answers you can set predefined clarification responses that can be selected when processing incoming clarifications.

Clarification categories and queues

When sending a clarification request, the team needs to select an appropriate category (or subject). DOMjudge will generate a category for every problem in every active contest. You can define additional categories in the DOMjudge configuration under clar_categories.

Categories are hence visible to the teams and they need to select one. In addition to this there’s the concept of queues. Queues are purely internal to the jury, not visible to the outside world and can be used for internal workload assignment. In the DOMjudge configuration you can define in clar_queues the available queues and a clar_default_problem_queue where newly created requests will end up in. On the clarification overview page, you can quickly assign incoming clarifications to a queue by pressing the queue’s button in the table row.

Balloon handling

According to ICPC tradition, every solved problem earns the team a balloon in colour specific to that problem. This can be facilitated with the balloons interface reachable from the main menu.

The interface can be accessed by administrators and any user with the Balloon runner role. It’s possible to assign a user only this role; they will be able to access the jury interface but only see and handle balloons. You need to enable balloons processing for a contest in the configuration under the Contests menu option.

For each first correct submission of a problem by a team, an entry is created in the table on the balloons interface. A runner can then be dispatched to hand out the inflatable award. The entry can be marked as ‘done’ by clicking the running person at the end of the row.

Each row will also list the total amount of balloons that team has earned so the runner can compare the resulting situation at the team’s workplace with the expected one. Where applicable there’s also an indication of whether this balloon is the first in the entire contest, or the first for that problem to be handed out, should you wish to do something special with these cases.

Normally balloon distribution stops when the scoreboard is frozen. This will be indicated in the interface and no new entries will show for submissions after the freeze. It is possible that new entries appear for some times after the freeze, if the result of a submission before the freeze is only known after (this can also happen in case of a Rejudging). The global configuration option show_balloons_postfreeze will ignore a contest freeze for purposes of balloons and new correct submissions will trigger a balloon entry in the table.

Static scoreboard

The public scoreboard can be output in ‘static’ form meaning it does not contain any interactive elements or refresh facilities. This you can use if you need to publish the scoreboard as an HTML webpage somewhere externally.

To get the static version, add ?static=1 as an URL parameter to the public/ scoreboard URL. You can additionally add a &contest= with the contest ID of a specific contest to output. The contest ID can also be the special value auto which selects the most recently activated contest.