Secret vs hidden teams

[deboer-tim]

Without naming CCSes, :) at least 1 uses 'hidden' teams to mean admin teams, e.g. jury teams testing submissions before the contest, and who should not be visible to spectators. Another uses hidden teams to mean teams that are public, but shouldn't be included in the scoreboard (e.g. ineligible sponsor teams).

The spec leans more toward the latter, but regardless it might be better to have a second property to indicate the difference, or use a tag instead of true/false? Or maybe there's another heuristic like 'teams whose only members are admins or judges should not be publicly visible'.

[niemela]

In my head-canon, the "hidden" teams were always meant to be actual teams, that shouldn't be shown, i.e. sponsors, or non-eligible teams.

I definitely agree that it's very useful for judges or system staff to be able to "send" submissions to clients downstream. The most obvious example is for the judges to submit all the sample submissions to test that everything is still working as intended. (Of course, everyone should have run that anyway when installing the problems, so this is obviously not needed 😉).

To me it would feel cleaner to have such submission not have a team (i.e. team_id = null).

A counterargument to this might be that we want to know who made the submission even if it was judges or staff (I'm not convinced), if we feel that way we could add a person_id ? to submission.

[deboer-tim]

In my head-canon, the "hidden" teams were always meant to be actual teams, that shouldn't be shown, i.e. sponsors, or non-eligible teams.

I definitely agree that it's very useful for judges or system staff to be able to "send" submissions to clients downstream. The most obvious example is for the judges to submit all the sample submissions to test that everything is still working as intended. (Of course, everyone should have run that anyway when installing the problems, so this is obviously not needed 😉).

To me it would feel cleaner to have such submission not have a team (i.e. team_id = null).

A counterargument to this might be that we want to know who made the submission even if it was judges or staff (I'm not convinced), if we feel that way we could add a person_id ? to submission.

Yeah, I think you're right that we've been creating teams just so these tests can be submitted, when they aren't really a team at all. I'm not sure which problem is 'cleaner' to solve though - making team_id optional on submission and adding person_id or account_id is kind of unfortunate too.