New Submission Services and Process!

Submitting deliverables to challenges and tasks is obviously a big part of the Topcoder Platform. Over the past several months the Topcoder Community has helped us build the foundation and core services that will power our submission processes and experience going forward. This is more than just an incremental improvement on existing services. Instead, its a brand new backend that has been swapped in to replace the existing legacy backend. Here is a summary of what was released:

New

• We’ve completely swapped out the backend services with a new and modern event based architecture aimed at better scalability, reliability, performance, automation, and user experience improvements.

• Added support for automating parts of screening, such as virus scanning and soon we will turn on additional automations to support things like image copyright scanning, test coverage analysis, static code analysis, etc.

• Added Filestack support for all challenges. This enables users to pull in submission files from cloud drives and an overall smoother upload experience.

• Added tours to introduce the new features and changes. For example,

• Added support for entering a URL as a submission instead of an actual file upload (coming soon).

Improved

• The design submission process has been reduced to a single file upload. This should provide for faster uploads and reduced issues when uploading submissions.

• Updated submission instructions and font/stock photo/icon policies

• Deprecated submitting from Online Review. All submissions should be done from the challenge page now.

Now that we have these foundational services in place, we will begin to introduce new features that will improve the user experience and robustness of the platform. Some examples of features we’re considering are:

• Instant feedback on your submission: Provide feedback to the user if their submission failed any automated scans/review when they upload. This would give users the ability to do some validation on their submissions prior to final submission.

• Automated reviews: We’re able to plug in systematic review processors that can provide input to reviews/scores on a submission.

• Marathon Match submissions will be moved to the new submission pages and services.

Please direct any questions and/or issues to support@topcoder.com or the forums.

Thanks,
The Topcoder Team