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CTF announcment time vs rating
I may sound like a broken record (since I've already suggested this last year), but I would like again to discuss the issue of late CTF announcements.
Ideally, a ranked CTF should be announced in a time that gives teams time to allocate time/resources for it. Personally I think 2 weeks is OKish for that purpose, 4 weeks even better.
If a CTF is announced later than 2 weeks before, it should have rank 0 (i.e. not be ranked).
Rationale: There were a couple of times when there were ranked CTFs showing up e.g. 24h before (the recent WCTF being a best example of that) or even after they started (I remember one such case in 2013-2014). Some teams didn't participate because they didn't notice in time. Other couldn't register because when they noticed, the registration was already closed (not all CTFs keep registration open after the start). This leads to bad situations where the ranking is influenced by the frequency of hitting F5 on CTFTime.org (because even RSS is sometimes laggy) and not CTF skill as it probably should be.
Seconding this. 4 weeks may be a bit excessive but a 2 week window seems fair. Or maybe limit the max rating weight depending on the announcing time: -Announced less than 1 week prior: max rating 0.0 -Announced 1 week prior: max rating 5.0 -Announced 2 weeks prior: max rating 10.0 -Announced 3+ weeks prior: any rating
I like the idea - i think it should be part of huge "weight gathering" problem discussed in issue #1 .
@gynvael: Would you consider "announcement" as "has a website", or "listed on CTFtime"?
