Disqualified from a National Web Design Competition for Using GitHub

This is one of those important events in life where you realise that sometimes those who hold seniority over you aren't necessarily as smart as you are. This experience will help you to cultivate a healthy disrespect for authority. We all go through something like this at some point.

The best thing to do is to find some sort of constructive way to channel your experience. One path I would suggest is to consider launching your own rival competition, where the judges are volunteers from industry, and the prize is an internship at a company or something like that. This would not only provide your peers with a great opportunity to get quality feedback, but also serve as a really useful experience that would help you in your future career. What have you got to lose?

Perhaps you could even get GitHub to sponsor it :)

Ah... student competitions... that brings up memories...

When I was 15 or so, I took part in a tech competition for under 19 year olds. I designed and programmed a website for "grading" your teachers, complete with an admin interface for generating anonymous 1 time use codes for students. The goal was to make it easy for schools to allow students to provide anonymous, private feedback to their teachers.

I didn't win (there were a lot of other submissions that were pretty amazing, so no hard feelings about that).

But a few months later, someone tipped me off about a public teacher grading website. It looked very similar to my website, it was the same design, just with different colors. I couldn't believe it, but digging into it I found out that one of the people running this website was a jury member in the tech competition.

Because they were shoddy coders and didn't properly quote user input on HTML pages, I used a simple script injection attack to show a Java script alert on one of the pages.

Their website went nowhere (turns out that allowing students to publically grade their teachers is not going to be used for constructive feedback...)

But I was quite disillusioned how the jury of this competition cared so little about the contributions, they apparently just saw them as free ideas.

As a former student that competed in both National and State TSA events from 2006 to 2012 (and won multiple trophies across events including the "webmaster" competition) I'm not really surprised by this outcome. That doesn't mean that its the right outcome but just a result of how these competitions are run.

The judges are all volunteers that may or may not have a background in the actual event they are there to grade. So you get someone that just shows up, reads the rules for the event and then judges accordingly to those exact rules. Which in this case since the website is hosted by Github it automatically gets disqualified for not meeting the rules of the event. This is a pretty easy thing to fix which is either A) Just have a custom domain that hides the github hostname B) host it somewhere else. The students here seem to have taken the B approach and have it up on netlify now.

I certainly empathize with the students here putting hard work into a project only to get disqualified on a technicality, it is a hard lesson to learn and one around maximizing your results within the rules as long as you follow all the rules. Hopefully they will be successful in getting the rules updated moving forward to be more clear about the default github page templates vs just raw HTML hosting.

To all the commenters that I see here writing comments among the lines of "rules are rules and must be followed to the letter", I strongly suggest you to read the book "Law for Computer Scientists and Other Folk" [1]. In one of the first chapters, it clearly explains that rules must be interpreted, and in doing so, one must take into account the specific situation a rule is being applied to. In this case, it seems quite clear to me that the intent of the rule was to prevent participants from using a tool that generates code for them, not to prevent them from using a version control system. So the real question to ask would be not if they used GitHub or not, but if they used it to generate HTML for their site or if they used it only for version control. In the former case, they deserve to be disqualified. In the latter, the rule doesn't apply.

I think that the real lesson here is that if a rule is too subjective to interpretation, is better to discuss it beforehand, because even if you're right the person responsible for enforcing it could still get it wrong.

[1] https://global.oup.com/academic/product/law-for-computer-sci...

> Template engine websites, tools, and sites that generate HTML from text, markdown, or script files

Github pages allows you to write index.md instead of an index.html, and therefore they count it as a webpage generator. Not sure if these kids used a markdown file for a page, but the capability is there and that makes Github more than just a dumb web server that serves html.

Possibly the judges are non technical, just basic designers so they can't tell the difference, so all Github pages would be banned and not just the markdown ones. But I think it would be better if they told the students so they could move it to a clean server in that case.

It’s disappointing how many comments here focus on the trees and not the forest. Regardless of the intent of the GitHub rule, this is supposed to drive interest in web development among young people, and instead it’s an exercise in bureaucracy and semantics.

I looked at the code and one important thing to note is that you should not use any element + onclick + window.open for links. Links should be <a> tags. The ones you currently have are impossible to navigate with a keyboard (that's called accessibility) and for someone that isn't running JavaScript.

Feels like whoever is running or judging entries for the TSA Webmaster Competition is not very literate in the field they are judging, if they consider Github a template engine.

Hi, I'm Shiloh, the guy that made the original reddit post and medium article. After reading some comments, I clarified my statement on GitHub's role in the CS industry

And the most recent update: https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/119j8o4/part_2_disq...

It looks like they simply don't realize that GitHub is not GitHub Pages.

People are dissecting the minutiae of the rules and the role of github but at the end of the day its bananas that some kids got banned from a 21st century web competition for using the proper tools.

edit: As a consolation prize HNers could follow the OP and his team-mates on medium or elsewhere

These people are now better known among people likely to hire webmasters than whomever won the competition.

The students did not violate the rules. The rules say that template sites like Wix, GitHub, etc. may not be used. They did not say "such as" GitHub. There's a difference. GitHub is merely illustrative of the template site concept, in this case incorrectly. The controlling requirement is that it be a "template site". Which GitHub is not. So this is a drafting error, not controlling language.

"Like" vs. "such as" has been a question on the Graduate Management Admission Test, because it is a distinction which might matter in a contract. But that distinction is somewhat archaic and probably beyond many teachers.

From the original reddit thread, I emailed the TSA to point out this, and one other stupid point - they expected 100% uptime from the students sites.

If this is supposed to be teaching the next generation of devs skills, then we've got a lot of Junior Developer Therapy ahead of us as we unteach the bad stuff.

Credit to those kids. School should be ashamed of themselves for that teacher’s inability to understand the nuance of the rule and more importantly work with and advocate for those kids. The teachers role never should be adversarial.

That being said, the cynic in me sees the “Technology Students Association” as a massive grift that would make the College Board blush and these competitions are simply college app padding, with enough categories and regional levels that everyone gets a line item (well I guess except these kids.) It’s disappointing and frustrating but ultimately of little importance.

It's extremely frustrating when people CHOOSE to not understand something.

On the other hand, it's bad to assume that because "everyone uses it", it's OK.

Having dealt with people who send code as HTML email with quotes replaced with "smart quotes", having been sent links to files / tarballs that don't actually link to those file / tarballs but to a web page instead, having been sent to sites that require knowing how the site works and/or browsing around and being unable to use a link to download directly via curl / nbftp / wget, I can understand that a group that doesn't want to deal with superfluous distractions would have rules about what can and can't be used.

GitHub is NOT trivial, and it is extremely browser centric. Trying to just download a file is an exercise in frustration if you're not familiar with GitHub. Copying a link to your clipboard that can actually be used to download a file is next to impossible, unless you already know how to use GitHub.

I can fully understand why the competition organizers specifically forbid the use of GitHub in their rules.

> You heard it here first folks, GitHub IS NOT the industry standard for code collaboration and version control, an expected tool for anyone entering the industry and a priceless skill for any aspiring developer.

Git is, GitHub is not. Yes it gave us Pull Requests but it is just another Corporation build around Git.

He is talking about Github, but Im more surprised to see Jekyll. On github, there is a slight possibility that you forked something. What does Jekyll do. If that's the case, they could even ban for using nodejs. Sorry folks, you can't use SASS here. But if it's explicitly stated in the rule book, I think the participant made the mistake of not getting to know the rules of competition.

Hmmm, the html files seem like the output of some form of generation, or perhaps a crappy web editor?

eg:

* https://github.com/thstsa/spacetourism/blob/main/technologie...

* https://github.com/thstsa/spacetourism/blob/main/index.html

* https://github.com/thstsa/spacetourism/blob/main/pricing.htm...

Those multi-line blank gaps all over the place are not something that generally occur in hand crafted or "from scratch" html.

That being said, the teacher sounds out of their depth and should either gain a clue or refrain from being involved in judging next year.

**

Optimal practical solution would probably be to try and get the rules fixed, so future participants don't get erroneously disqualified.

> OVERVIEW Applying leadership and 21st century skills, participants are required to design, build, and launch a website and present a given topic pertaining to technology.

I think if the purpose of the competition is to apply 21st century skills then they shouldn't ban 21st century tools.

This would be a facepalm moment for me if I were these guys.

Because while they used GitHub in the most common manner, to host a code repository. Not only did they violate the rules technically, they also inadvertently violated them practically.

README.md is a markdown file. GitHub parses this into that little blurb you see below the repo. This is technically a violation of the rules. Part of your project is technically generated by GitHub.

Yes, it is dumb. Yes, I would have done the same in your position. Because I also would not have read the rules that deep. Or just forgot that they counted GitHub among the template generators.

Ultimately, I would have just been kicking myself because I would have felt that this could have been avoided.

I'd also ignore the statement from peterkelly that you're probably smarter than those running the competition or who made the rules.

Also, consider that even if you were selected for consideration, you still may not have won. They didn't disqualify you because they were scared of your prowess. They disqualified you for violating a rule. I'm not sure how many entries they get per year, but it's likely they're looking more for reasons to drop than to add.

Remember, there can be only one winner. And that winner will be the team that made the fewest mistakes.

> Template engine websites, tools, and sites that generate HTML from text, markdown, or script files

That basically covers every tool.. I don't know what "generate HTML from text" means, HTML _IS_ text.. so.. notepad is disqualified too I guess? Since that generates HTML files from text if you save the file with the .html extension ?

A [shitty] lesson learned for the unfair, arbitrary, or flat out incorrect decision-making by others that will affect you throughout life. How we react is what will make us.

A custom domain probably would have saved them from DQ. The github.io domain really threw up a red flag regardless of whether they used Github Pages or not.

I think how the situation turned out and how you dealt with it, gave you a much more important life experience! Dealing with BS project blockers by clients/execs and finding a way to turn it into something positive is not something they teach at school, well done team!

I had a professor who wanted to flunk me for using html/css over flash for a final project.

"GitHub IS NOT the industry standard for hosting code collaboration and version control through Git, an expected tool for anyone entering the industry and a priceless skill for any aspiring developer."

Is this a conflation of Git and GitHub?

When the people in charge are not only ignorant but also arrogant enough to not admit their mistakes.

Life 101.

most people are pathetically bad at their jobs, the sooner you realise that the better

sometimes thats you, so you should always reflect and improve

Teachers can be the biggest a-holes on earth when it comes to irrational judgements. I recall doing a website building elective in middle-school where we hand coded a simple site. They made the content of the site required to complete the project and get a grade. I had been writing sites already previous to the class for hire for 2 years at that point so I figured this class was an easy A. I had ADHD and this was the 90s (zero understanding/help), so writing filler content wasn't going to happen. I turned it in expecting to get like a B or C. Nope, F. The site was perfect valid code. Teacher was just a jerk. Dropped the elective.

It's funnier when you realize Markdown parsing is basic feature of every other repo hosting like GitLab or Bitbucket

Thats okay, these are always run by idiots. I graduated in 2001 and we worked really hard on our site to profesionally design a site for a real company and we lost to a crappy site with a marquee and blink tag because it was more "dynamic".

In the rules for the competition, there's this:

I. Template engine websites, tools, and sites that generate HTML from text, markdown, or script files, such as Webs, Wix, Weebly, GitHub, Jekyll, and Replit, are NOT permitted. [1]

So the fact that you hosted it on Github disqualifies you. Regardless of whether you used their jekyll engine. I would immediately resubmit it from a shared hosting provider or by setting up an S3+CloudFront static site.

[1] https://tsaweb.org/docs/default-source/themes-and-problems-2...

That's not even a tough break. It is the product of administrators who are not qualified to run the competition. I wonder if the same thing would have occurred if they used Plastic SCM.

Many schools also block GitHub, Stack Overflow, Replit, and others on their networks while trying to promote STEM. Incredibly frustrating.

Imagine having a US History important figure report contest. With a rule that forbid using anyone who was a US president. And someone uses Benjamin Franklin, and gets disqualified because someone on the rule committee thought "Franklin" was a US president.

> Template engine websites, tools, and sites that generate HTML from text, markdown, or script files, such as Webs, Wix, Weebly, GitHub, Jekyll, and Replit, are NOT permitted.

LOL. It's like a muskets-only shooting competition.

Just a bit jealous. We didn't have compos back when people mistakenly double clicked web site links. Was almost forced into using a barely templatable database engine.

> You heard it here first folks, GitHub IS NOT the industry standard for code collaboration and version control, an expected tool for anyone entering the industry and a priceless skill for any aspiring developer

Indeed, it's not. It's a popular online hosting service for repositories for said tool, said tool being `git`, which by the way is fully functional for version control without a remote repository.

GitHub uses Jekyll as a template engine for Github Pages, and it was even mentioned in the rules, so technically they are in the right.

If I were the OP, I would loooove to try that competition next year again.

Those who can't do...

They obviously meant GitHub Copilot, but it got 'lost in the translation' and here we are.

I’m not sure why the non technical teacher is getting flak, as much as I hate to admit it, they were just following rules and avoiding future headaches.

Assuming they were super technical and didn’t disqualify the students, what would happen when other competitors call foul for using GitHub? Now this makes the approver look bad, but also could have unintended consequences in the competition.

Me, I would have told the kids to use Gitlab or one of the other non explicitly mentioned repositories, because sometimes, as silly as rules can be, need to be followed literally.