Configuring the system

Configuration of the judge system is done by logging in as administrator to the web interface. The default username is admin with initial password stored in etc/initial_admin_password.secret.

The general system settings can be accessed under Configuration settings. Changes take effect immediately.

Setting up users and teams

Under Users from the homepage you can add user accounts for the people accessing your system. There are several roles possible:

  • Administrative user: can configure and change everything in DOMjudge.
  • Jury user: can view submissions and judgings. Can view clarification requests and send clarifications. Can rejudge non-correct judgings (submissions judged correct can only be rejudged by an administrator).
  • Balloon runner: can only view the balloon queue and mark balloons as delivered.
  • Team member: can view its own team interface and submit solutions (see below).
  • Several system roles: they are for API access. The most imporant one is judgehost which means the account credentials can be used by a judgedaemon.

To set up teams, you can start in the Teams page and add teams there. You then have the option to automatically create a corresponding user account that is associated with the team.

It is also possible to use the Import / Export page to import ICPC-compatible tsv files with teams.

A jury or administrative user can also be associated with a team. This will enable that user to submit solutions to the system, or resubmit edited team solutions.

Adding a contest

You configure a new contest by adding it under the Contests link from the main page.

Besides the name the most important configuration about a contest are the various time milestones.

A contest can be selected for viewing after its activation time, but the scoreboard will only become visible to public and teams once the contest starts. Thus no data such as problems and teams is revealed before then.

When the contest ends, the scores will remain displayed until the deactivation time passes.

DOMjudge has the option to ‘freeze’ the public and team scoreboards at some point during the contest. This means that scores are no longer updated and remain to be displayed as they were at the time of the freeze. This is often done to keep the last hour interesting for all. The scoreboard freeze time can be set with the freezetime milestone.

The scoreboard freezing works by looking at the time a submission is made. Therefore it’s possible that submissions from (just) before the freezetime but judged after it can still cause updates to the public scoreboard. A rejudging during the freeze may also cause such updates. The jury interface will however always show the actual scoreboard.

Once the contest is over, the scores are not directly ‘unfrozen’. You can release the final scores to team and public interfaces when the time is right. You can do this either by setting a predefined unfreezetime in the contest table, or you push the ‘unfreeze now’ button in the jury web interface, under contests.

All events happen at the first moment of the defined time. That is: for a contest with starttime “12:00:00” and endtime “17:00:00”, the first submission will be accepted at 12:00:00 and the last one at 16:59:59.

Setting up problems

When this is done, you can upload the intended problems that teams need to solve under Problems. DOMjudge supports uploading them as a zip file or configuring each problem manually via the interface. You can add a problem to a contest while uploading, or associate it by editing the contest from the Contests page later.

It is possible to change whether teams can submit solutions for that problem (using the toggle switch ‘allow submit’). If disallowed, submissions for that problem will be rejected, but more importantly, teams will not see that problem on the scoreboard. Disallow judge will make DOMjudge accept submissions, but leave them queued; this is useful in case an unexpected problem shows up with one of the problems. Timelimit is the maximum number of seconds a submission for this problem is allowed to run before a ‘TIMELIMIT’ response is given (to be multiplied possibly by a language factor). A ‘timelimit overshoot’ can be configured to let submissions run a bit longer. Although DOMjudge will use the actual limit to determine the verdict, this allows judges to see if a submission is close to the timelimit.

Problems can have special compare and run scripts associated to them, to deal with problem statements that require non-standard evaluation.

Checking your configuration

From the front page the Config checker is available. This tool will do a basic sanity check of your DOMjudge setup and gives helpful hints to improve it. Be sure to run it when you’ve set up your contest.

Testing jury solutions

Before a contest, you will want to have tested your reference solutions on the system to see whether those are judged as expected and maybe use their runtimes to set timelimits for the problems.

The simplest way to do this is to include the jury solutions in a problem zip file and upload this. You can also upload a zip file containing just solutions to an existing problem. The zip archive has to adhere to the ICPC problem format. For this to work, the jury/admin user who uploads the problem has to have an associated team to which the solutions will be assigned. The solutions will automatically be judged if the contest is active (but it need not have started yet). You can verify whether the submissions gave the expected answer in the Judging Verifier, available from the jury index page.