Awards for Timed Events

[TheodorKitzenmaier]

Overview

For my team's ASU Capstone project, we are adding competitive timed events to the dojo. As part of this effort, we are adding awards for top participants in the event. Unlike existing awards in the dojo, these would be granted based on performance in the event (first, second, and third place) rather than completion of a dojo. Such an awards system requires changes to the pwn.college infrastructure, hence the opening of this issue.

Details

Project Design

Events are a set of challenges contained within a module. The module is made visible at the start of the event, and participants work to complete as many challenges as possible as quickly as possible. The three participants who complete the most challenges the fastest within the duration of the event should be given awards for first, second, and third place.

Events Dojo
├─ Event Module 1
│  ├─ Event Challenge 1
│  └─ Event Challenge 2
└─ Event Module 2
   ├─ Event Challenge 3
   └─ Event Challenge 4

Awards

About

Awards should exist for first, second, and third place in an event. Currently, there is no plan for these awards to be temporary.

Presentation

If awards were given in a similar manner to the current awards on pwn.college, they would quickly clutter up the award space. A solution would be to display event awards differently than the typical dojo awards on pwn.college. Our proposition is that three emojis will be set aside for use first, second and third place awards. If a user has obtained at least one of the awards, that emoji will be displayed on their profile. When hovering over the emoji, instead of showing the dojo the emoji is from, it would instead display a list of all the events they earned that tier of award in. This would allow users to display these badges without cluttering the emoji space.

Granting Awards

The primary issue is how these awards should be granted to event participants. Currently a discord bot is used for management of the event and determining which participants "won" the event. One idea is that this bot, or a version of the bot controlled by the pwn.college team, would be able to somehow have privileged access to dojo APIs which could grant these awards. Another possibility is that it could be automated with a special case for the events dojo, however this takes away the ability to restrict awards to users who registered for the event.

Potential Issues

1. The event awards system should (probably) be restricted to only be used by the events dojo. Community dojos should not have the ability to start distributing event awards on a whim.
2. If there is a privileged API for the bot to use, how should it be authenticated?

Required Information

1. Should the granting of awards be handled internally by the dojo (granted automagically), or externally by the event bot (API calls)?
2. How should granting of the awards be authenticated?

[TheodorKitzenmaier]

@ConnorNelson input on this issue would be greatly appreciated!

[ConnorNelson]

How about something like this:

• We can add a permission named "dynamic_awards" to dojo.permissions (basically we manually add that permission if someone has it, and you just check if "dynamic_awards" in dojo.permissions).
• We add an API endpoint, maybe something like a POST to some @dojos_namespace.route("/<dojo>/award"). This needs a user_id, emoji, and description. We create a class DynamicAwards(Awards): __mapper_args__ = {"polymorphic_identity": "dynamic"} or something like that. Let it auth via update_code.
• Everywhere that wants to display Belts and Emojis should now also be ready to display DynamicAwards.

Follow on work might be interested in deleting these awards (to make them temporary), or somehow "deactivating" them to make it clear someone previously was awarded it, but is no longer the current holder (e.g., imagine king of the hill style awards). We don't need to think too much about client side support for this, we can just require that it is handled programmatically (e.g. by a Discord bot, or GitHub action).

---

Probably if we intend to go in the direction of further expanding "awards", which we probably do it seems, we should consider renaming merging Belts and Emojis into CompletionAwards and just checking the corresponding dojo to see how it displays (e.g. a belt vs emoji, etc).