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Disqualified from a National Web Design Competition for Using GitHub

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Re: Disqualified from a National Web Design Competition for Using GitHub

#281

Post by eternalban »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #266
LanceH wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rule is ambiguous and can be read two ways. Tools which pull code from places like ...github...are not allowed. # Github as a tool doesn't generate code. Tool like ...github... which generate code are not allowed. # Github is certainly a repository from which code templates are pulled. Love the "results are final". No flexibility from people running things is a great quality to prepare youth for the real world of…

Results are final means they’re too insecure to admit fallibility

Is it a given they would have won? Who were the winners and what did their work look like? Even with the best of intentions they would have to (a) re-register the entry, (b) redo the competition or review against current winner. And then possibly (maybe!) judge it to be superior to the current winner and then open that can of worm, or not.

Re: Disqualified from a National Web Design Competition for Using GitHub

#282

Post by devhead »

gabereiser wrote: post #214

In the rules for the competition, there's this: I. Template engine websites, tools, and sites that generate HTML from text, markdown, or script files, such as Webs, Wix, Weebly, GitHub, Jekyll, and Replit, are NOT permitted. [1] So the fact that you hosted it on Github disqualifies you. Regardless of whether you used their jekyll engine. I would immediately resubmit it from a shared hosting provider or by setting up…

kids don't have credit cards; the organization should have been providing free paid hosting with git support and ability to deploy through github actions...it should have been: git and github is a requirement for hosting your code. imho

Re: Disqualified from a National Web Design Competition for Using GitHub

#283

Post by justin_oaks »

GTP wrote: post #178

To all the commenters that I see here writing comments among the lines of "rules are rules and must be followed to the letter", I strongly suggest you to read the book "Law for Computer Scientists and Other Folk" [1]. In one of the first chapters, it clearly explains that rules must be interpreted , and in doing so, one must take into account the specific situation a rule is being applied to. In this case, it seems q…

> I think that the real lesson here is that if a rule is too subjective to interpretation, is better to discuss it beforehand, because even if you're right the person responsible for enforcing it could still get it wrong.

This is definitely a good idea. Sadly, it's all to common to discuss things beforehand and STILL have an enforcer get it wrong.

You could talk to the person responsible for writing the rules, but since the enforcers are different people with different interpretations, you can still get denied. Even between two different enforcers you could get different results.

It's unfair, it's sad, but that's the world we live in.

Re: Disqualified from a National Web Design Competition for Using GitHub

#284

Post by eternalban »

pksebben wrote: post #257
synunlimited wrote: post #19

As a former student that competed in both National and State TSA events from 2006 to 2012 (and won multiple trophies across events including the "webmaster" competition) I'm not really surprised by this outcome. That doesn't mean that its the right outcome but just a result of how these competitions are run. The judges are all volunteers that may or may not have a background in the actual event they are there to grad…

my understanding was that they were DQed for using github, not hosting there. Which is just bananas. I can't think of a single decent piece of software that doesn't use Version Control, and 99.9999% of the software I know uses git for VC. We need a new format. This institutional nonsense is for the birds.

How about reading and adhering to client project specs? That is a legitimate and important aspect of engineering. The spec said no github. Jekyll is also a legitimate tool for "decent software". In the professional realm, you will be using code generating tools, so the argument that 'X is commonly used for software development and thus the requirements are boneheaded' does not hold up,

Re: Disqualified from a National Web Design Competition for Using GitHub

#285

Post by btschaegg »

eternalban wrote: post #281
teaearlgraycold wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Results are final means they’re too insecure to admit fallibility

Is it a given they would have won? Who were the winners and what did their work look like? Even with the best of intentions they would have to (a) re-register the entry, (b) redo the competition or review against current winner. And then possibly (maybe!) judge it to be superior to the current winner and then open that can of worm, or not.

Well, with a quantum of class, they could

  1) acknowledge that their judgement was erroneous, 
  2) publish that as a correction, listing the project, ideally with a small apology and at least some details on how the entry would have been judged if not for the GitHub link and
  3) create a separate prize for "projects our judges learned valuable lessons from".
As a good example of a similar precedent, look at this entry from 1994: https://web.archive.org/web/20200214094614/http://www0.us.io...

Re: Disqualified from a National Web Design Competition for Using GitHub

#287

Post by eternalban »

btschaegg wrote: post #285
eternalban wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it a given they would have won? Who were the winners and what did their work look like? Even with the best of intentions they would have to (a) re-register the entry, (b) redo the competition or review against current winner. And then possibly (maybe!) judge it to be superior to the current winner and then open that can of worm, or not.

Well, with a quantum of class, they could 1) acknowledge that their judgement was erroneous, 2) publish that as a correction, listing the project, ideally with a small apology and at least some details on how the entry would have been judged if not for the GitHub link and 3) create a separate prize for "projects our judges learned valuable lessons from". As a good example of a similar precedent, look at this entry fr…

Yes, that would have been the classy move.

Re: Disqualified from a National Web Design Competition for Using GitHub

#288

Post by jallen_dot_dev »

bena wrote: post #271

This would be a facepalm moment for me if I were these guys. Because while they used GitHub in the most common manner, to host a code repository. Not only did they violate the rules technically, they also inadvertently violated them practically. README.md is a markdown file. GitHub parses this into that little blurb you see below the repo. This is technically a violation of the rules. Part of your project is technica…

> GitHub parses this into that little blurb you see below the repo. This is technically a violation of the rules. Part of your project is technically generated by GitHub.

No, that's Github interpreting markdown for display on Github.com. That's not generating any part of the project that they submitted.

Re: Disqualified from a National Web Design Competition for Using GitHub

#289

Post by jallen_dot_dev »

johnklos wrote: post #243

It's extremely frustrating when people CHOOSE to not understand something. On the other hand, it's bad to assume that because "everyone uses it", it's OK. Having dealt with people who send code as HTML email with quotes replaced with "smart quotes", having been sent links to files / tarballs that don't actually link to those file / tarballs but to a web page instead, having been sent to sites that require knowing how…

The judges don't have to use Github. OP was disqualified because the judge noticed either the Github banner on the page or github in the url.

> GitHub ... is extremely browser centric.

This is a strange criticism if we're talking about a website competition.

Re: Disqualified from a National Web Design Competition for Using GitHub

#290

Post by Animats »

pksebben wrote: post #261
forgotpwd16 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They did not say "such as" GitHub. But that's what they said. https://tsaweb.org/docs/default-source/themes-and-problems-2...

Holy cow. They did say that. We're doomed. If this is how we introduce kids to tech, we can guarantee they bail and do something more intellectually rewarding, like Business Admin or Sales /s For real though, a similar thing nearly happened to me. over a decade ago I took a community college class CS101 - and it was taught by a guy with no knowledge and no investment (and they got you started with Java, of all things…

Ah, you're right. The article used "like" at one point, but the rules say "Such as".
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