Competitor Services

During the competition season, there are a number of hosted services which the competitors use. These are managed using ansible to configure a "competitor services" VM, typically within Mythic Beasts.

The services typically include:

Forums
A space which the competitors can use to chat with each other and with mentors and to ask for help with developing their robots. Historically we have used PHPBB, although from SR2021 onwards we have moved to using Discord with a bot to gate entry.
Code submitter
For the virtual competitions, this is a mechanism for competitors to submit the code for their virtual robots.
IDE (no longer used)
A hosted web-based environment which allows competitors to develop code for their robots without needing to install anything on their own computers.
User accounts (no longer used)
User accounts are needed for access to the IDE and our self-hosted forums. We also host a management interface so that team-leaders can administer the user-accounts of their teams.
Ticket access (no longer used)
At the physical competition we gate entry through the use of tickets which competitors download from the website ahead of time.