Hi all,

As some of you might have noticed, I've made a couple of changes to the administration part of the competition center. The submission form, as well as all other existing backend stuff has been cleaned up and ported to PHP, and a number of new features have been added:

• The awards field has been changed to a select field instead of a free text field (This way, the database 'knows' which crescent level will be awarded for a certain competition, and it can use that information later). Of course, an 'other' option that still allows free text entry still exists. This option doesn't benefit from the automatic processing of awards though (see below).

• The organizer (submitter) of a competition can now add participants to any competition, and specify for each of this participant how high he/she placed. These placements can be changed later, so it's possible to add participants as submissions are coming in, and then add placings when you've graded the competition

• For the participants added to a competition, this will be noted in the 'activity' section of their dossier

• Once all participants and placements have been entered (and assuming the 'other' award option has not been used), the organizer of the competition can, with one press of a button, automagically award crescents to the winners. This will take up- and downgrading based on participation numbers into account. This action will further lock the participation data for that competition in place. (make it read-only) (and yes, this means people don't need crescent award permissions anymore, as long as the competition has been previously approved by the MAA office)

Hopefully this will be a useful addition to the site. I've ran a script to 'guess' participation and placement of previously ran competitions, but of course only people who were actually awarded an award for a certain competition were affected by that. The MAA staff has the ability to 'unlock' closed competitions as well as manage participation.

If you want previous competitions you've placed in or participated in listed on your dossier, please try to contact the person organizing the competition, and have them provide a full participation/placement list to the MAA staff.

TLDR: new competition administration: go check it out, it's awesome :)