First, the deadline is today at 4 pm Central Standard Time.
If you have an issues with your submissions, please post your question here. If you have a question you would prefer to send via email, please send it to [email protected].
Is there a certain number of online challenges that need to be submitted in order to be considered for Excellence aware at World Championship?
Hi Rick!
i have a few questions…
I am submitting 2 different online challenge videos for our two teams from our school…I made 2 submissions in error and wrote to robotevents to have them delete the incorrect entries, however, they are still appearing. Is there any way you can delete them from your side, or is there a way to delete them from my side that I do not see? Thanks!
Also, if one of the videos we submitted goes to credits at 1:31, will it be thrown out? We also included our team name and school in the beginning of the video, should we take this out, since it appears in the credits? The total time is under 1:45, however, the actual video cutting to credits happens between 1:31 and 1:32. If I have to edit and re-upload the new video, I will be happy to do so.
Lastly, are we going to get more information about how to “vote” and have people “vote” on our videos? The kids have been asking so just wondering.
Thank you so miuch for your time and help! I appreciate it!
Kris
We delete duplicates once a day – please check back tomorrow.
We know that both video-editing software and video hosting services like YouTube do not necessarily end right when you thought they would. A few seconds one way or the other will not affect the judging results. Having a video that runs more than a few seconds long WILL affect the judging results.
The voting options are on the Online Challenge Submission pages, and will be live once the submission process is over. To vote, people have to create a user account using the “register” button before voting.
You are welcome! Thanks for participating in the Online Challenges.
I am having a problem voting. There is a text box that says move the slider to chose a 1-5 score, and a submit rating button to submit it, but there is no slider to slide. I don’t know what the problem is. Can you please look into this?
It has already been reported to our programmers, but they will not get a chance to look into it before tomorrow. I suggest you take another look tomorrow afternoon.
On the online challenge for the websites, I had to resubmit my website, and I thought that the duplicates would be deleted, but they are both still there and people have started voting and I don’t want people to vote on the two different entries. Can the votes from my first submission be transferred to my new submission and the other one taken off? My first submission that I would like taken off and have the votes transferred to my other submission is (entry ID 3991) The one that I want to keep and have the votes transferred to is (entry ID 4356) If you can’t transfer the votes, that’s okay. I just want there to only be only one entry to vote on for people so it isn’t confusing. Thanks in advance.
As we said earlier in this forum, if there is some issue with your entry, send an email to [email protected], or post it here. I just checked our email and I do not see a request to delete entry 3991 either there or here on the forum.
I will have entry 3991 deleted, but there is no way to transfer votes.
Ok, thank you.
On my submission for the robot mascot #4407 we posted the link while the video was still being processed. I posted a comment with the correct link is there a way you could make that the official link?
Thanks in advance.
Will the winners be based entirely on voting, or will they be judged in addition to the voting? Thanks in advance
“Judges will select ten finalists from the submitted entries, and will take community voting results into account in making their choices. The finalist submissions will then be judged by additional selected professionals whose scores will be combined with the preliminary-round judges’ scores to determine the winner of the EMC Robotics Team/Club Website Challenge.”
http://forum.robotevents.com/design/challenge/detail/225#details
Can I address the elephant in the room?
Something that I don’t like is the bots on the online challenges. They downvote everyone else’s posts, but upvote their creators. I am aware of the teams that do this, and It’s not hard to tell who is doing it at all. I think the whole voting system is flawed. it should be a yes/no, not a percentage. Also, if something only votes no to everything except for one team/user’s post. They should be simply banned from voting.
My 2 cents.
I agree with harrio34, it should be just a yes/no. You can easily vote down everyone’s percentage, and make yours better! It is a completely flawed system for voting! Everyone should get two votes, or even one, but it should be just a yes/no vote. People can easily vote on your entry and bring it down without even looking at it. There can be great entries but they have just been voted down by everyone else, then everyone will assume it is a bad entry. This voting system is so messed up and is unfair to everyone.
Do you mean that people have set up robots that automatically vote for entries? Don’t you need an account to vote?
Edit: I think I see what you might mean. There are some entries with tons of votes, way more than the rest. While it might be that their entry is really awesome and everyone else’s is terrible, most likely they are getting all their friends and family to vote on it.
RECF, if you’re listening, have a contest in which us, the students, Create you a new website that will solve the problem with these bots. I’d even say that the UI on the submission system is a bit dated(No Offence), and I’d love to see more modern design, and better security/optimization!
I love that idea!! It would fix most of the problems. Once the challenges are over you should really consider doing it since that would solve a lot of problems.
Hmmm, I’d be willing to bet any new online challenge website/backend would come with it’s own set of entirely new issues 
It’s not easy making something highly secure or error free. Pretty much everything ever made has been constrained by time/money which ultimately dictates how close (or far) from perfection the final product actually is.
Of course a new system wouldn’t be perfect, but nobody said that an online challenge voting system designed by high school students needs to be perfect. As long as it hasn’t the problems we are experiencing now it is already better and should replace the old one. Maybe whatever someone will come up with won’t be perfect, but isn’t it the same with a robot: The initial design might not be perfect, changing it might cause issues but it will also eliminate other problems that have been there.