Create a blind-judged writing competition — students submit stories, assigned judges score privately, and winners are revealed on a scheduled date.
A story competition lets you host a creative writing contest with blind judging. Students submit their stories as blog posts tagged with the competition code. Before the reveal date, each student can only see their own submission — this keeps the judging fair and avoids students reading each other's entries before the deadline. After the reveal, everyone can read all stories and see the final ranked leaderboard.
This walkthrough creates a Bangla short story competition on the theme "বর্ষাকাল ও স্মৃতি" (Monsoon and Memory) with three student submissions and one judge scoring them out of 100.
Submitting to a public story competition requires the Author role (to publish public posts). You can promote trusted users to Author from the admin user panel, or run a group-scoped story competition where any group member can submit without the Author role.
From the public competitions list, admins navigate to /admin/competitions to manage competitions.
Click New Competition and set the type to Story. This unlocks story-specific fields.
registration start → registration end → submission deadline → reveal date → end date. Each step must be after the previous one. This creates the timeline students see on the competition card.
After creating and publishing, the admin detail page shows the competition with its timeline, linked judge(s), and a placeholder for submissions.
Each student goes through this flow:
For tutorial simplicity, we pre-created 3 stories from 3 authors:
When a student opens the competition Posts tab before the reveal date, they see a notice that other submissions are hidden. Only their own post is visible.
Writing competitions work best when students can't read each other's entries before the deadline — it prevents copying, keeps the judging blind, and lets every participant develop their own voice.
The judge (assigned when the competition was created) logs in and can see all submissions immediately — they don't wait for the reveal date. Their view shows every story with a score input (0–100) and an optional feedback text box for each.
The judge reads each story, enters a score, and writes feedback. In this tutorial the judge assigned:
At this point the leaderboard exists internally but isn't publicly visible yet.
Once all judges have scored, the admin clicks Publish Judge Scores. On the reveal date, the leaderboard becomes public and all stories become readable to everyone.
"Publish scores" is a separate admin action from the "reveal date". You can publish scores early, but the leaderboard only appears publicly once the reveal date passes. This lets you prepare the final rankings quietly and have a coordinated reveal.
After the reveal, anyone visiting the competition sees the full ranked leaderboard with judge scores:
The Posts tab now shows all submitted stories for anyone to read.
Clicking any story opens the full post — written in the same rich editor used for any BanglaTech blog post. Judges' feedback can optionally be shown on the author's own view.
For quiz-based competitions with instant auto-graded leaderboards, see the Quiz Competition tutorial. For recurring game challenges, see the Game Challenge Competition tutorial.