Series
A round, a week or a class - scheduling it, moving it, and stopping it.
A series is a round, a week or a class. What it is called on the participant's screen comes from the activity type; what it does is the same either way. An activity holds its problems in series, so a new activity needs one before it holds anything.
Creating and scheduling one
New series asks for a name, a slug unique within the activity, and optionally when it opens and closes. Everything else is edited on the series itself.
| Field | What it decides |
|---|---|
| Opens, Closes | the schedule the countdown is drawn against |
| Ranking visible from, until | whether there is a board at all. Empty from means this series' own start; empty until means for ever |
| Ranking freezes at, revealed at | a freeze inside the board: late results are withheld between the two. Clear both to unfreeze now |
| Importance | while this round runs, anything of a lower importance is locked for whoever takes part in it |
| Importance reaches | whether that lock reaches the other activities a participant is in, or stays inside this one |
| Reachable only from | address ranges, comma-separated, 10.0.5.0/24. Empty means anywhere; elsewhere the round is not shown at all |
| Restrictions in force | one switch that lifts the rank and the ranges together, for the day the list turns out to be wrong |
| Judged by its own Runners | whether this round overrides the activity's Runner tags |
| Reveal the problem count while closed | the count only. The problems themselves are never sent while it is closed |
The four instants are four different questions: the freeze hides late results inside a board, the window decides whether there is a board.
Series are ordered with the up and down buttons, not by dragging — a keyboard reaches a button, and a round order is set once and left alone.
Moving a round, in minutes
A projector that would not work, a network that came back at 10:07. The Move the series card takes a round, a number of minutes and shows you the new times before you commit them. Negative moves it earlier, which is an ordinary thing to want.
The ranking freeze, the reveal and the visibility window move with it. A round delayed by an hour that froze at the old wall clock would freeze before it finished.
It sends the delta, never the two new times
Two managers reacting to the same delayed round would each read the old start, add ten minutes, and write the same new time — and one of the two shifts would be silently lost. Sending "+10 minutes" makes both of them count. It is also why the field asks for minutes rather than offering you two date pickers.
A series with no dates has nothing to move, and the card says so rather than showing a dash that looks like a time.
Pausing, and starting again
Pause is one click from the list; it does not need the series opened first. While a series is paused nothing is accepted for it and its countdown stands still.
Pausing asks one question:
- Take the statements away as well. Off by default. Taking a problem off the screen of somebody in the middle of it is violent, and they have read it already. Turn it on for a leak, or a mistake in a statement.
Resuming asks a different one, and tells you how long the pause has lasted:
- Give the time back: move the end by the length of the pause. On by default — an outage taking ten minutes off a contest is the thing pausing exists to prevent. The end, the freeze, the reveal and the end of the visibility window all move by the length of the pause. Unticked, every date is left exactly as it is.
Whether a series is open is stored, not worked out
The Server keeps is this running as a fact of its own rather than comparing the dates every time it is asked. A scheduler owns the ordinary transitions — it opens the round when the start passes and closes it when the end does — and pausing or resuming writes it directly.
You will notice this in two places. A paused round is shut even though its dates say it should be running; and a round whose dates you have just moved is reconciled in the same act, so the badge and the clock never disagree. What you will not see is a screen that says running while the Server refuses submissions.
Attaching problems
Each series holds an ordered list of assignments. An assignment is where the per-use configuration lives — the letter the participant sees, the version pinned, what it is worth, the limits — and none of it is on the problem itself. That is The problem library.
Deleting one
A series can be deleted only while nothing has been submitted to any of its problems. Once something has, the button is refused: those submissions are what somebody may come back for.