Remove From My Forums

SR Summary: A Disaster

General discussion
0

Sign in to vote

Overall, the competition was a disaster for me. I am dissappointed with the whole arrangement.

The web-site wasn't well thought of, hardly professional but I can pass that.

I missed a programming competition because someone forgot to renew the domain. Now, thats just stupid. Microsoft cannot afford(?) to automate their domain renewals? I am no Microsoft but I have my own little sites (around 20 domains) and I am yet to miss a single renewal date. Let's forgive them for missing the date. You would think the domain would be back up in like a few hours or atleast in a "few days" but the site was out for weeks. It shows what little commitment they had to the entire project. Even if just one staff was dedicated for the project for the entire year, stuff like this could've been avoided.

I haven't been able to do like half the programming challenges because I couldn't log in at all. It was weird, I could randomly log in and some times I was locked out for weeks. In fact, even months at times. I tried literally everything. Logging out of the entire live services (failed to log out SR but I wasn't logged in the first place according to the site). Deleting cookies. Different browsers and heck, even different OSes. There were a bunch of threads about the same issue and everyone was as clueless as I was. I nearly gave up on SR by then, but in the end I figured it out. Turns out, it was because I was trying to log in from http://studentrockstar.com and not http://www.studentrockstar.com/ (notice the missing www?). I am speechless. I lost around 5k points because I couldn't log in.

One thing I still haven't been able to figure out is how did the highest ranked people managed to get well over 10k points early in to the competition. Back then, the only way to get the major points was either the forums or the programming challenges. The rest of the stuff, Imagine Cup, S2B, Teasers, etc came much later. Even if you aced all the challenges and was #1 in forums, you would even come close to 5k, let alone 10k+. The only possible explanation is posting and rating umpteen number of news and whitepapers. Even then, it had its limits too I think. So, if someone could enlighten me on this, I will be glad to hear it.

Too bad how it all turned out, I was really determined to qualify for being a student partner. I concentrated on only one Imagine Cup, the algorithm challenge. The competition timings beautifully clashed with my exams and I lost that opportunity too. As for S2B, I couldn't even get past the registration process. The AJAX was poorly done. Had several problems while filling up the form alone. When I finally managed to submit, it just gave me a generic error message without a trace of what I did wrong. I tried several times, different browsers, different days, months apart even, and yet, same result. I guess it had something to do with the patten of my form input.

Oh well, I hope things will be better next year and I hope it went well or at least, relatively better for the rest of you guys.

Saturday, May 31, 2008 7:15 PM

All replies

0

Sign in to vote

SR contest is Over .

Overall experience is bad. I am not satisfied with the work that is done by ADMIN.

Site was already created in the start of the contest , ADMIN had to just update the points from the database......If he can't do this simple work, thn plz dont create such type of competitions.

Even 1st Edition was better than 2nd Edition.

This SR site is dead(only Quiz Comp. was active) from Dec. 2007.

I think that ,in the Microsoft, no body know that what is "Student Rockstar" except ADMIN.

Message for Microsoft:

If you(MS) can't handel the competition, then plz dont start. This SR is pathetic.

@Indokely

Rajkumar Mundel

Email: indokely@gmail.com

Saturday, May 31, 2008 7:51 PM
0

Sign in to vote

hi Rahul,

don't worry.. I am really proud of you to have targetted the algorithm challenge in Imaginecup. that shows your interest and determination in being great in algorithms. I luv u for this! Do you see anyone else in your circle interested in algos and stuff or are you alone like me?!

fun fun fun. lot of fun abt student rockstar! here is one more to add to it all..
i got a few e-mail invites. i accepted them all and only then realized anyone cud use it to code for me in the devsquare challenges since there is no password authentication LOL. ofcourse that didn't happen.. but still.. its really funny!
and don't tell me they trace email addresses and stuff. NO WAY M BELIEVING THAT! haha

Sunday, June 1, 2008 1:46 AM
0

Sign in to vote

add me to ur list guys..i too participated in Algo contest....i managed to get 600th position in first round...after that i had my exams and almost the same situation as Shyam faced....

Sunday, June 1, 2008 2:38 AM

Rajkumar_Mundel_b882d5 wrote:

SR contest is Over .

Overall experience is bad. I am not satisfied with the work that is done by ADMIN.

Site was already created in the start of the contest , ADMIN had to just update the points from the database......If he can't do this simple work, thn plz dont create such type of competitions.

Even 1st Edition was better than 2nd Edition.

This SR site is dead(only Quiz Comp. was active) from Dec. 2007.

I think that ,in the Microsoft, no body know that what is "Student Rockstar" except ADMIN.

Message for Microsoft:

If you(MS) can't handel the competition, then plz dont start. This SR is pathetic.

@Indokely

Rajkumar Mundel

Email: indokely@gmail.com

You bring up a good point. I forgot to mention but the site in itself was way out of sync with the competitions and hardly updated. Even now, the "3rd Programming Challenge..." marquee is still going on. I missed a challenge just because of it. I just logged in and quickly read the date, didn't notice it was for the 3rd challenge and I thought I missed the challenge.

hi Rahul,

don't worry.. I am really proud of you to have targetted the algorithm challenge in Imaginecup. that shows your interest and determination in being great in algorithms. I luv u for this! Do you see anyone else in your circle interested in algos and stuff or are you alone like me?!

fun fun fun. lot of fun abt student rockstar! here is one more to add to it all..
i got a few e-mail invites. i accepted them all and only then realized anyone cud use it to code for me in the devsquare challenges since there is no password authentication LOL. ofcourse that didn't happen.. but still.. its really funny!
and don't tell me they trace email addresses and stuff. NO WAY M BELIEVING THAT! haha

First off, thanks Smile and yes, I am alone too. In fact, I am yet to find literally anyone in real life who is really interested in understanding the deeper roots of programming, algorithms, etc. My classmates (Computer Science Engineering Course), teachers and even my computer science HOD (head of department) are all incompetent and can barely do a "Hello World" properly. I guess you can't expect any better from a university syllabus with a decade old Turbo C++ with a 16-bit compiler. sigh Sad

As for Imagine Cup, like I said, I couldn't participate properly for any of the challenges because of the random exam time tables. The only time I could participate was for the very last challenge. I stayed up for two days straight trying to solve them but I felt something was missing. Most of the figures were inhumanly difficult. In the end I found out, we were actually supposed to brute force everything. It took me a few days to make a parser, compiler, etc for it and even collected computers for raw processing power. I could only compute like 25% of the solutions by the time the competition ended. I guess next year will be easier for me.

Glad to see you have similar interests. You can contact me:

E-Mail: jetblazer@jetblazer.com

MSN: jetblazer@gmail.com

GTalk: jetblazer@gmail.com

Sunday, June 1, 2008 1:38 PM