How To Judge (tl;dr)
- Sign in at railsrumble.com.
- Browse through and favorite entries.
- Sort your favorites from 1 through 10.
- Finalize your picks to cast your votes!
- There are four steps!
The Finer Points
How Entries Are Displayed
When browsing entries, please note that the list is randomized for you. Each time you go in, you’ll see the same order of entries. However, different people see different orders. Try viewing the entries list while not signed in, from a different browser.
How Points Are Calculated
Every competitor that ships an app is considered a judge. The sum of every competitor judge’s favorites will determine who wins the the overall 1st through 10th awards and the Best Solo award. Additionally, favorites from anyone that isn’t a competitor judge (they can sign in via Heroku or Twitter once the judging period officially opens) will determine the Public Favorite award.
You can see prizes for the 2015 Rails Rumble in this blog post.
No matter who you are, you can have up to ten favorite entires that count for points. So, as you browse and visit entries, favorite the ones you like. When you’re done, go to your favorites list and reorder your top ten. After you finalize the picks on your favorites list, your points will be locked in. Your #1 favorite counts for 10 points. Your #2 favorite counts for 9 points. This continues all the way down your #10 favorite, which counts for 1 point. No other favorites count towards awards.
After the judging period concludes, all of the points will be summed up and the top ten winners, Best Solo, and Public Favorite will be revealed. Nothing else affects points awarded to entries. That’s it.
If you competed, your team’s collected points will be revealed to you privately in your team’s dashboard, if you’d care to see that.
A Complete Judging How To
What to Look For
The Rails Rumble provides no restrictions on what competitors should build. They can build a productivity app, a game, a communication tool, or anything else they can think of. And as a community judged event, whatever entries the community collectively feels should win, will surface to the top and be awarded prizes.
Having said that, here are a few things you may want to look for when picking your favorites:
- Is it clear what this entry is meant to do?
- Does the entry work and do what is intended?
- Does the entry appeal to you or can you see how it may appeal to others?
Additionally, this is a Ruby specific competition and we urge you to consider the parts of the entry built in Ruby. However, as Ruby has matured, everyone understands that it is often used to fill the role of a backend service, and this may be essential to the app’s function. Use your best judgement.
Signing In
- Go to railsrumble.com.
- Click the “Sign In” button on the top left.
Browsing Entries
- After signing in as a competitor or public judge, click “Browse The Entries” at the top.
- You’ll be sent to http://railsrumble.com/entries/all and shown a list of all entries (http://cl.ly/image/0E472X2s3V0H).
Marking Entries as Favorites
- While browsing entries, click the “Favorite” button (http://cl.ly/image/2T423D2o1d3C) for every entry that you find interesting. This gives you an easy way to bookmark an entry. Your favorites aren’t displayed to anyone and you can favorite as many entries as you’d like.
- After you’re done going through the entries and picking favorites, click the “Browse The Entries” section at the top, then click the “Favorites” button to see your list of favorites.
- From here, you can drag and drop to reorder your top ten favorites using the crosshair target on the right (http://cl.ly/image/2c0P3T0H3d3e).
- The top ten entries you pick are assigned points in decreasing order from #1 to #10. Your #1 pick is assigned 10 points and your #10 pick is assigned 1 point. Any entry you favorited that appears after your tenth pick won’t be counted when we tally the votes.
- After you’ve ordered your top ten favorites, click the “I’m Done - Finalize My Picks” button to let us know you’re done and that we can assign points and count your picks.
Tips for Browsing Entries
- The “Browse Entries” page will continuously scroll and load more entries until the end.
- Every time you visit the “Browse Entries” page, you’ll see the entries in the same exact order. However, to keep things fair, each person visiting this page will see entries in a different order.
- You can filter the list of entries by clicking the arrow attached to the “All Entries” button and selecting a specific category.
- Clicking the “Launch Site” button will open a new tab for the entry’s website and privately, for you, flag the entry as being viewed.
- You can also filter the list to display only those you’ve viewed or haven’t viewed by clicking the “All Entries” button and then choosing the corresponding action http://cl.ly/image/0x2U1x3r0Z3m.
- Clicking the entry name link or the “Leave Feedback” button will open a new tab for the entry’s profile that includes a more detailed description, a list of resources, and a comments section. We encourage you to leave feedback in the comments section of as many as entries as you can.