Tournaments

A tournament is an organized event with published rules. The list groups events under running, upcoming and finished. Each banner carries the name, the theme, the dates, a countdown while there is one left to count, how many have entered, the prize tiers as medals and where your own entry stands.

The event page is the rules, the phases, the standings or the results, and your entry. Rules are the theme, the modes allowed, the largest share the manuscript may hold of pasted and machine text, the length limit and how judging is done. All of it is published before entry opens and none of it changes afterwards.

The phases live inside the event’s own start and end. Registration first, then writing, judging and results, in the order the server answered them. The phase the clock falls in is marked. A tournament starts when its registration opens, not when its writing does.

Entering needs five things and each has its own answer. An account, an account the community layer is open to, an attestation that you are eighteen or over, a tournament in its registration phase, and a receipt for the book at the chain head you are entering. Each refusal names which of the five is missing, because what to do next is different for each.

Entry runs as three steps in order. First the receipt: the head of the book’s chain is countersigned, which is the only thing that receipt gates. Then the upload: the record of how the book was written goes straight to storage over a link signed for exactly the number of bytes declared, so the book never passes through the API. Then the entry: the server reads the record back and runs its five checks over it.

A refusal stops on the step it belongs to. An entry refused for want of a receipt shows the reason on the receipt step rather than as one line at the bottom of the dialog, so the step to repeat is the one marked.

The verification is the server’s own reading of the file. Five checks: the chain hashes to what it carries, the head was one you had already countersigned, every mode in the record is one the tournament allows, the pasted and machine shares are inside the published limits, and no sitting rose by more words than its own length accounts for. All five pass and the entry reads verified; any one fails and the entry failed, with the figures the finding was made on beside it. No check is a claim about whether a person wrote something, and no detection tool of any kind is run on anybody.

Standings are inside one event. An event’s own entries ordered by the words the verifier counted, with the verified mark beside each. Nothing else in the application orders people against each other.

A finished event carries a podium, a ceremony and featured openings. The podium keeps the place, the tier and the work, and it keeps them after an account is deleted, because a podium with a hole in it would rewrite what happened at an event other people were at.

Entering publishes your figures for the length of the event. That is read off the standing entry rather than written anywhere, so withdrawing or the event ending stops it at once. Withdraw takes the entry out of the standings and the record out of storage.

Try: open a running tournament while signed out. Enter stands where it is, disabled, with the reason beside it, and the standings and the rules are readable all the same.