How to create a contest ----------------------- (Last updated: 10/Oct/2011 by cassio@ime.usp.br) 1) Log in as "system", empty password. 2) Click on "Options" and change the password of the user "system" to something secret and safe. 3a) (Most likely you don't) If you have an import file, click on "Import", choose the file, click to Send it and go to step 4. Note that many follow steps will be already complete. However, take a time to look at them and verify if everything is ok. 3b) Click on "Contest" and create a new contest (do it by choosing the "new" item of the combo). 4) Change/Verify the information of the new created contest and click on "Send". Then click on "Activate" to make the new contest activated (after that you will be automatically logged off). Here some explanation about available fields: * Name: name of the contest * Start date: when the contest will begin * Duration: how many minutes the contest have * Stop answering: number of minutes from which teams don't receive the information if their runs were accepted or not. Usually choose 285 for fifteen minutes without answers to teams. * Stop scoreboard: number of minutes from which the scoreboard becomes frozen (to keep the winner secret :-). Usual value: 240. * Penalty: number of minutes a team is penalized for each time it submits a code that is not accepted (this minutes are counted only if the team receives an YES for the corresponding problem, as done in ACM-ICPC like contests). Usual value: 20. * Max file size allowed for teams: for security reasons. If you know that source code files are larger, choose another value. * Contest main site number: which is the main site of the contest (in case of multi-site contests). Usually 1. IF RUNNING MULTIPLE SITES, BE SURE TO USE THE CORRECT NUMBERS HERE ASSIGNED BY WHOEVER IS COORDINATING THE MULTI-SITE CONTEST!! * Contest local site number: which is the number of the current site of the contest (in case of multi-site contests). IF RUNNING MULTIPLE SITES, BE SURE TO USE THE CORRECT NUMBERS HERE ASSIGNED BY WHOEVER IS COORDINATING THE MULTI-SITE CONTEST!! 5) Log in as "admin", empty password. 6) Click on "Options" and change the password of the user "admin" to something secret and SAFE!! 7) (This can be probably skipped if they are already included) Include any answers for submissions that you might like to have in addition to the standard ones. Click on "Answers" and use the two fields to input the answers. Already pre-included are: 1 YES 2 NO - Compilation error 3 NO - Runtime error 4 NO - Time limit exceeded 5 NO - Presentation error 6 NO - Wrong answer 7 NO - If possible, contact staff Even the pre-included ones can be changed, but that is not recommended. If you make some mistake, you can re-insert the answer even without deleting it. Just fill up the fields again, repeating the answer number (first field). In this case the database record will be updated. But take care: any changes with the contest running will affect all records of the contest. Do not delete any record during the contest unless you really know what you are doing. The updates cascade on the database, removing or updating everywhere needed. 8) Include the contest languages. Use the "Languages" item for it. Each language is defined by a number, a name and two scripts: one for compiling and running the submitted codes and one for verifying if the output generated is equilavent to the judge's output. The scripts should be any executable file permitted in the computer that will run the autojudging environment (pay attetion on CRs or CRLFs for EOLs. This causes problems in some systems). It's also possible to import the language information from a file. The scripts are available together with BOCA in the "bits" example directory of the documentation. Usually values are: 1 C C.run compare.sh 2 C++ Cpp.run compare.sh 3 Java Java.run compare.sh Remember, all these scripts are available on "bits" directory. Take some minutes to look into those script files, because they have path specifications for some executables, such as gcc, g++, javac, etc. These paths must be fixed (if needed) before uploading the file to BOCA. Usually the default values work just fine. If you find any trouble with the scripts, let me know. If you make some mistake, you can re-insert the language even without deleting it. Just fill up the fields again, repeating the language number (first field). In this case the database record will be updated. But take care: any changes with the contest running will affect all records of the contest. Do not delete any record during the contest unless you really know what you are doing. The updates cascade on the database, removing or updating everywhere necessary. 9) Include the problems. Click on "Problems" and use the form available there. The fields are: * Number: number of the problem. Start with 1. * Name: nickname of the problem. Good choices are problem letters: A, B, C, D, etc. Problem fullname: the complete name of the problem. Problem basename: the name of the sourcecode file expected, without the extension. This is essential for Java programmers, who must use this name as the main class name. * Descfile: a file containing the description of the problem. It can be a html file, pdf file, etc. It will become available to the teams during the contest. You may leave this field empty. * Inputfile: file with the input to be used when judging the submission of this problem (it's possible to have troubles with CRs and CRLFs for EOLs when using multiple OSes). * Solfile: file with the correct output for this problem when executed with the inputfile. This is the file that will be compared with the output generated by the team's code (again, it's possible to have problems with CRs and CRLFs for EOLs when using multiple OSes). * Time-limit: maximum number of seconds the code should spend trying to solve this problem. * Color name: name of the color for this problem. It will be used if the balloon figure cannot be displayed. * Color (RGB): enter the rgb value, in the standard HTML format for colors, for this problem. E.g. 000000 is black, FFFFFF is white, FF0000 is red, 00FF00 is green and so on. Colors are interesting because BOCA presents the balloons with the problem colors. Nevertheless, they are not essential. If you make some mistake, you can re-insert the problem even without deleting it. Just fill up the fields again, repeating the problem number (first field). In this case the database record will be updated. But take care: any changes with the contest running will affect all records of the contest. Do not delete any record during the contest unless you really know what you are doing. The updates cascade on the database, removing or updating everywhere needed. 10) Include the users. There are five types of users that can be used: admin, team, judge, staff and score. admin: manage the contest. He(she) has access to every clarification, run, logs, tasks, etc of the contest. It is him(her) that starts and ends the competition (although it can be done automaticly by the system). You don't need to have more than one or two admin accounts. judge: responsible for judging the submission and answering the clarification. It's used to have from three to eight judges. Note that admins, judges and staff must have well formed passwords. staff: responsible for printing files, delivery balloons, helping teams with hardware problems, etc. Normally one staff account (for the chief staff person) is enough. score: account with the scoreboard. It has no other privilegies. This account is good for making the coachs informed about the results and for making the results available to remote people. A few score accounts are enough. team: here is where the contest happens. These accounts are for the teams. The passwords are not so important if we restrict the access of each team by IP addresses. The same thing may be done for the other users too (and it's a good practice to improve security). The users can be imported by a text file too. See IMPORT.txt for details. The fields presented in the "Users" item are: * User site number: number of the site of the user. Usually 1. * User number: number of the user (used internally by the system). Usually equals the team number. * Username: nickname of the user. Used to be team1, team2, team30, judge1, judge2, admin1, staff1, etc. It's possible to have the same usernumber and username in different sites. In a single site contest, all user numbers and usernames must be distinct. * ICPC ID: ID Number of team in the ICPC System. * Type: type of the user (team, judge, staff, admin, score) * Enabled: is the user enabled? * Multilogins: can the user make more than one connection at the same time? It's not a problem to allow that if the users are restricted by IP numbers. * User full name: complete name of the user. In case of teams, it's convinient to put the institution name plus the team nickname here. * User description: some detail about the user, like students names. This field is optional. * User IP: if set, it restricts from where the user can log in the system. It is recommended to restrict the logins by IP numbers. If using Maratona Linux, the IP number is 10.0.99.X for the team numbered X. * Password: password of the user. You may leave it blank for the team users as each team user is restricted by IP. Choose good password for admins, judges and staff. If you make some mistake, you can alter the user fields. Click on the user number in the table and proceed to its fields below in the page. Edit them and resubmit. Note that, if you do not fill a new password, the old password is kept. IMPORTANT WARNING: for users, it is possible to click on a number for editting the information. All other admin flips regarding problems, answers, languages, etc do not follow the same idea. If you click on those number, the corresponding record will be removed, together with all database information related to that record. So DO NOT REMOVE ANYTHING DURING THE CONTEST. 11) Configure the site data in the "Site" item. The fields are: * Site number: number of the site, with a "new" item to create new sites. This is not necessary for single contests. * Name: name of the site * Public IP: internet IP address of this site for communicating with the others. Not needed for single contests. * Start date, End date, stop answering, stop score: equivalent to admin's contest page. Usually the default values are enough. * Runs/clars that will be judged here: for multi-site contest, it defines which runs/clars will be judged in this site. It is a list of site numbers, separated by commas. For a single site contest, just leave the site number here. * Tasks that will be treated here: same meaning of the previous field. For single contests or multi-site contest it's used to have each site treating its tasks. So leave here * the number of the site. * Active: is the site active? I hope yes. * Autoend: should the contest ends automaticly at the defined * time? Usually yes. * Globalscore: should the scoreboard be propagated to all sites? Not needed for single contests. * Autojudge: do not use this option for a contest. It is under development/test. * Scorelevel: detail level of information on the scoreboard. 0 means no details while 4 means maximum detail. 2 is a good choice, although, for single contests, 3 and 4 are also ok and more informative. A negative number means the same as its absolute value counterpart, but keeps the problem names hidden (useful when the same problem set is used in sites with very distinct start times). Furthermore, there are buttons for: start the contest, end the contest, delete completely (and without undo) the runs, clarifications and tasks of the site, disable logins, enable logins and force all users to log off. The start and stop buttons should not be used as the contest start and stop are automatic. They are just for special purpose, like a energy fault. In this case, you may, when energy supply become stable again, use the "Stop at" field and button to indicate when the contest should have stopped and then the "start now" button to re-start the contest. This will make the BOCA see this interval time as they never happened, and all penalty and time calculations will be made correctly. The "delete all" fields (delete all clars, delete all runs and delete all tasks, delete all bkps) are useful (AND IMPORTANT!) for cleaning everything up just after finished the warmup. Between the warmup and the real contest, you do not need to create another BOCA contest. Just erase all warmup problems, all clars, all tasks and all runs (keeping the languages, users and answers). Now, reenter the contest information (start date and duration, insert the real contest problems and you are ready. 12) It's all done. Important Note -------------- Any deletion of problems, languages, answers, users, etc will promptly delete all records related. So deleting an answer will remove all runs with that answer. Deleting a problem will delete all clarifications and runs related to that problem. This way, it's not recommended to remove any of these things during the contest. Contacts and Copyrights ----------------------- BOCA Copyright (c) 2003- Cassio Polpo de Campos (cassio@ime.usp.br) http://www.ime.usp.br/~cassio/boca //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// //BOCA Online Contest Administrator // Copyright (C) 2003-2012 by BOCA Development Team (bocasystem@gmail.com) // // This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify // it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by // the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or // (at your option) any later version. // // This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, // but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of // MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the // GNU General Public License for more details. // You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License // along with this program. If not, see . ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////