Open, freeze, suspend and close a contest
A contest is always in exactly one of six statuses, and no settings field sets it. Scheduled and Complete happen by themselves when the start and end times pass; Frozen, Suspended and back to Open are things an organizer does while the contest runs; Finalized is the deliberate end of it.
The actions are in the row menu on the contests list and in the header of the contest itself, and they all need permission to write contests.
The six statuses
Status | What it means | What a participant sees |
|---|---|---|
Scheduled | Has not started yet | The contest page, the schedule, and a Join button where visibility allows. No problems |
Open | Running | The full contest interface: problems readable, submissions accepted |
Frozen | Running, submitting restricted | The full interface plus a warning banner. Submissions are rejected |
Suspended | Running, interface withdrawn | A "Suspended" screen. No problems, no submissions |
Complete | Over | Results, editorials and upsolving as configured. Official submissions are no longer counted |
Finalized | Over, results permanent | The same as Complete, plus certificates where they are configured |
A contest reaches Open and Complete on its own. The actions below exist to move it early, or to intervene while it runs.
Start
Scheduled → Open. Opens the contest now instead of waiting for its start time. It asks for confirmation only.
Starting rewrites the schedule: the start time becomes now, and the end time shifts to preserve the contest's original length. The times you planned are replaced, not kept — so if you start a three-hour contest twenty minutes late, it now ends twenty minutes later than the schedule said.
Freeze and Resume
Open or Suspended → Frozen, and Frozen → Open. A frozen contest keeps its participants inside the interface: they can still read the problems and everything they have already done, but submitting is restricted and a banner explains why. It is the mild response to something going wrong — a problem with a broken test, a venue-wide network failure — where you want to stop the clock's effect without throwing anyone out.
Freezing the contest is not the same as freezing the scoreboard. Freezing the contest is this status change and it affects submitting. Scoreboard freezing is a setting, it happens by itself near the end of the contest, and it only stops the standing from being updated. Neither one implies the other.
Resume puts a Frozen or Suspended contest back to Open and accepts submissions again. It resumes a contest that is still running; it does not reopen one that has finished.
A frozen or suspended contest also shows a warning on its Overview tab with a Resume button in it.
Suspend
Open or Frozen → Suspended. Withdraws the participant interface entirely: participants get a "Suspended" screen with no problems on it, and their status shows as Blocked while it lasts.
This is the heavy-handed response to an incident mid-contest — a leaked statement, an evacuation — where Freeze is the mild one. Resume brings everyone back.
Stop
Open, Frozen or Suspended → Complete. Ends the contest now instead of waiting for its end time. It asks for confirmation only, and rewrites the end time to now.
Participants can no longer submit for score, but nothing about the results is fixed yet: rejudging, penalties, disqualifications and violation review are all still possible, and the scoreboard can still be rebuilt. That is the whole point of Complete being a separate status from Finalized.
Finalize
Complete → Finalized. Offered only once the contest is over, and there is no way back. Finalizing fixes the standings and the medals, issues certificates where they are configured, and stops the console offering the edits that would move an official result.
Because it is one-way, it has an order of work in front of it — rejudging, violations, disqualifications and medals all belong before it. Finalize results sets out that checklist and the full list of what finalizing disables.
Check
Runs the plagiarism analysis over the contest's submissions. It is available while the contest is Open or Complete, and needs a plan that includes plagiarism analysis — see Why a section is missing if it isn't offered. Nobody is disqualified automatically; each finding is filed for a jury to look at. See Violations.
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