[mathking]

I think the comparisons to the end of build season are not really fair. This problem is more akin to the old days when weather or some other issue would prevent FedEx from getting to a build site to pick up the robot. I guess the part I really do not like is the glibness of saying "Submission has been open since November..." We never decide for sure on our nominees until toward the end of the build season. If we are nominating our best two candidates, we want to include what they did this year. Both of our candidates had things we included in the essay that they did in the latter part of this season. We did have both essays uploaded ahead of time. But when we were ready submit the system was down. And it didn't get back up until after both of the mentors who can submit were busy with work. Yes it is our fault, in that we could have done it a couple of days ahead of time. But we would not have had nearly as good a submission. In the grand scheme of things, this might make us decide on candidates earlier in order to make sure that this doesn't happen again.

I would love for FIRST to pursue some simple technical solutions. Perhaps you can save and if the system is down the saved essay would be submitted. This would make me feel a lot better about starting ahead of time, as it would be possible to update with good things without running the risk of timing out in submission.