For a participant
Signing in, getting into an activity, sending a solution, and reading what came back.
You are here to take part in a contest or a course, not to run one. These pages cover exactly the screens you can open.
In a hurry
| You want to | Read |
|---|---|
| get in at all | Signing in |
| open an activity from inside your course | Arriving from your course |
| find your contest or course, or join one | Activities |
| read the regulations, where the organizer published any | Rules |
| know why a round shows nothing | Rounds, weeks and classes |
| read a problem, or find out why Submit is grayed out | Problems |
| send a solution | Sending a solution |
| find out what happened to one | What happened to my submission |
| get your code back, or fix and resend it | Your source code |
| see where you stand | Ranking |
| ask the organizers something | Questions and announcements |
| get your code on paper | Printing your code |
The shape of it
An activity is one contest or one course. Inside it are series — a contest calls a series a round, a course calls it a week or a class. Each series holds problems. You send a submission to a problem, a Runner evaluates it, and a result comes back.
Everything you do happens inside one activity. The navigation on the left changes when you enter one, and what it offers depends on what the organizer switched on.
Keeping it on your device
AlgoJudge installs. Where your browser offers it — Install on a desktop, Add to Home screen from the share sheet on a telephone — you get an icon that opens the application in a window of its own, with no tabs and no address bar. It is the same installation at the same address; what changes is the window around it.
The icon says AlgoJudge, and not the name of your university or your contest. An installation's name, logo and colors arrive from its Server after the page has already begun drawing, so your browser has read none of them at the moment it writes the shortcut. The tab title follows the installation; the shortcut cannot. Where your browser lets you edit the name as you add it, that is where you tell two installations apart.
Signing in through your institution happens inside the installed window. The installed application claims the whole of the address, so the trip out to your provider and back stays in it rather than opening a browser beside it. See Signing in.
It opens with no network, and says so in its own words. The application keeps a copy of itself on the device, so the window still opens on a train or in a basement: you get AlgoJudge's own screen, This device is offline, rather than the browser's error page. Nothing that needs the Server works until the connection is back — no problem statement, no submission, no ranking — and the screen waits and puts the application back on its own once it returns.
That screen has two other forms, and the wording is what tells them apart. The Server is under maintenance means somebody is working on the installation, and The Server is not answering means it cannot be reached from here. In all three nothing you have already sent is lost.
It does not go stale. Every time it opens with a connection it takes the current version from the installation; the copy on the device is what answers only when the network does not.
If even that copy is gone — a first visit made while offline, or a browser that cleared its storage — the address answers with a small page reading No connection, in Polish and English at once, because nothing on it knows which language you chose.
Nothing reaches you while the window is closed. The installed application sends no system notifications. A verdict lands on a screen you have open, and is waiting for you when you come back.
Two things worth knowing before a contest starts
Problems open at a moment, not when you refresh. The screen updates itself when a round opens, is paused, or ends. You do not have to reload.
Three kinds of problem ask for three different things. One takes a program, one takes a program and sends it to an external archive, and one takes answer files and no program at all. Which one you are looking at decides what the submit form shows you. See Sending a solution.