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Voting offline and rehearsing the vote

Two tools designed for the day of the event, in the card under the header of the voting page: voting offline, for when the room has no reliable network, and rehearsing the vote, to try it from start to finish with the real contest before the judging.

Voting offline

The voting page of a contest or league works without a network if, while online, you first download what it needs.

Before the event, online

  1. Open the voting page of the contest or league (Votes in the menu).
  2. In the card, under Vote offline, you will see the connection status and the Download button. Press it.
  3. Wait until it says Ready to vote offline: N photos. The screen, the photo lists of every theme and the photos at reduced size are saved.

Do it from the same browser and the same computer you will take to the room: the download lives in that browser.

On the day of the event, offline

Open the same voting page. The card will say Offline, but the jury table and the gallery load anyway, and you vote as always. In the Jury table you can also see each photo's breakdown and fine-tune the votes. Every save stays on the device and the card shows N votes waiting to upload.

Anything that needs the server —cutting, assigning awards, disqualifying, closing the contest or notifying participants— appears greyed out with the notice Not available offline. Do it when the network comes back.

If you open any other Picstar page without a network, you will see an Offline notice with a selector of what you have downloaded, to go straight back to voting.

When the connection comes back

Pending votes upload on their own as soon as there is a network, whatever page you are on. The card goes back to Online and the pending counter disappears. If a vote made offline overlaps one that already existed, the most recent one wins, just as if it had been saved twice.

When you no longer need it

Remove download deletes the saved photos of that contest. Downloads are not removed automatically.

Tips

  • A phone sharing its data connection solves almost every "no wifi in the room" case without downloading anything. Voting uses very little data.
  • In Safari (Mac), the download is deleted after seven days without using Picstar if the app is not installed. Use Chrome, or install Picstar.
  • If the browser offers Install Picstar in the address bar, accept it: you will have the icon on the desktop and the download is protected.

Rehearsing the vote

It lets you practise the in-person vote with the real contest —its photos, its jury members and its awards— and erase everything afterwards.

The secretary and the association's administrators can use it, in contests with in-person voting, when the contest is in voting and still at zero: no votes, no awards and no minutes. If there is already something, the card explains why it cannot be started.

  1. In the card, under Voting rehearsal, press Start rehearsal and confirm.
  2. The Rehearsal mode strip appears at the top. From then on everything works as on the day of the event: voting, fine-tuning in the Jury table, cutting and assigning awards. What you cannot do is close the contest — closing it would reveal who took each photo, and that cannot be undone — so there are no minutes and no notifying participants either. Nothing you do is visible outside the voting screen.
  3. When you are done, press Leave rehearsal and confirm. The votes, awards and cuts are deleted, and the contest stays in voting, ready for judging day.

Disqualifications are kept: they are almost always made when reviewing the photos and they are real.

You can also rehearse offline. Rehearsal votes left on a device without uploading do not slip into the real vote: if they upload after leaving the rehearsal, they are discarded. The screen warns in red how many votes were not saved: if any was a real vote, cast it again.