Let people join a contest

There are two ways into a contest: an organizer adds someone, or the person joins by themselves because the contest's visibility lets them. Most contests use both — the roster is seeded with the people who must be there, and everyone else registers.

Either way the person has to be a member of the space first. Adding participants needs permission to write contests.

Add one person

1. Open the contest and go to Participants.

2. Click Add participant.

3. Choose the role — Participant for a competitor, or Staff, Tester, Author or Coordinator for someone helping run the contest.

4. Choose the member. Individuals and teams both appear here; a team competes as one participant.

5. Tick unofficial if they should be scored but left out of the official standings.

6. Confirm.

Add a whole group

Adding people one at a time does not scale to a class or a school, and there is no CSV or spreadsheet import. Bulk enrolment goes through groups instead: put the people in a group once, in Members, and add the group to each contest they take part in.

1. Open the contest and go to Participants.

2. Choose Add group from the toolbar.

3. Pick the group, and tick unofficial if the whole group is taking part out of competition.

4. Confirm.

The group is expanded once, at the moment you add it. People who join the group afterwards are not added to the contest, and people who leave it are not removed — so if your class changes between contests, add the group again rather than expecting it to follow.

Let people join by themselves

Whether anyone can join without being added is decided by the contest's Visibility, on Settings → General:

• Public — the contest is announced on the space's website and anyone can join.

• Unlisted — it is not listed, but anyone with the link can join.

• Private — nobody can join on their own; only people you add.

A participant who joins from the contest's landing page gets the contest's registration form. A contest can ask its registrants for details about themselves — the same profile fields the space keeps on its members — and the form arrives pre-filled with whatever the space already knows. A contest that asks for nothing registers them straight away. Answers can be corrected by registering again, and what someone answers may decide whether they compete officially or unofficially.

Two toggles on Settings → Participation shape what self-registration produces:

• Join unofficially — everyone who joins on their own is marked unofficial. Use it when you want to add the official field yourself and let anyone else take part out of competition.

• Require admission — a registrant is held out of the contest until an organizer accepts them in person, one session at a time. See Participants.

Whether people may still join once the contest is over is a separate setting, Allow follow up — see Start time, duration and extra time.

Restrict who can actually start

Registering is not the same as being let in. Two independent gates sit between a registered participant and the problems, and both are described in Participants:

• A passcode, set on one participant at a time, which their client must be given before it shows the problems.

• Admission, where an organizer accepts the person on site.

A contest can use either, both, or neither.

After they have joined

Everyone who has joined appears on the Participants tab with a status. From there you can grant extra time, award a medal, or disable, disqualify and delete a participant — all covered in Participants.