Data Resilience and Score Safety
How Prism protects competition results against loss
Prism - April 2026 - For club administrators and competition operators
The one-line answer
Every score is saved to the server the moment it is entered. If anything goes wrong - internet drops, laptop crashes, power fails, browser closes - the scores already saved are completely safe on the server. When you reopen the page, everything restores exactly as you left it.
Why this matters
A photography competition represents months of effort by dozens of members. The scores recorded on competition night determine who wins prizes and who advances to higher grades. Getting this wrong - losing scores, corrupting results, or being unable to complete the judging - would be genuinely harmful. Prism is designed so that this cannot happen in practice.
Where scores are stored
Judge scores
Every time the judge enters a score and advances to the next image, that score is written immediately to the database server. This is an atomic operation - either the score is saved completely, or it is not saved at all. There is no partial state.
Additionally, each score is simultaneously written to the local storage on the operator's laptop. This creates a dual backup: scores exist both on the server and locally, independently.
Member phone votes
Each vote from a member's phone is written directly to the database at the moment it is submitted. Phone votes are never stored temporarily on the device - they go straight to the server. If a member's phone loses connection after voting, their vote is already safe.
Final results
The blended final score (judge + audience average, weighted) is calculated and saved when the operator clicks "Publish scores and finish" at the end of the competition. The raw judge scores and member votes are preserved in full regardless of whether this step has been completed, so the calculation can always be re-run.
Failure scenarios
| What goes wrong | What actually happens |
|---|---|
| Browser closed accidentally | Reopen the competition runner. All scores restore from the server automatically. Continue from exactly where you left off. |
| Browser crash | Same as above. Scores are on the server, not in the browser. |
| Laptop power failure | Recharge and reopen. Scores saved before the crash are on the server and also in local storage on the laptop disk. |
| Internet drops | Competition continues. New scores queue to local storage and sync automatically when connection returns. The Publish button stays locked until all scores are confirmed synced. |
| Internet drops + laptop crashes while offline | The only genuine risk. Scores entered during the outage and not yet synced could be lost. Mitigation: do not close the browser while the amber status bar is showing. Use the Venue Pack for venues with unreliable internet. |
| "Publish scores" not clicked | Entries show no final score on the admin page, but all raw scores are intact in the session. Reopen the competition runner and click Publish. Safe to run multiple times. |
The status bar
The competition runner setup screen shows a permanent status bar:
- Green "All scores saved" - everything is confirmed in the database. Safe to close the page.
- Amber "X scores syncing" - some scores are in the queue. Do not close the page. Click "Sync now" if it does not clear automatically.
- Red "Offline" - no internet connection. Continue judging; scores are being stored locally. Reconnect before ending the competition.
The "Publish scores and finish" button is physically disabled when the bar is amber or red. It is not possible to accidentally publish incomplete results.
The Venue Pack (last resort)
The Venue Pack is a self-contained offline competition runner you can download before the event. It requires no internet connection at all. The entire competition runs inside a single browser file on the laptop. At the end, it exports a scores file which is imported into Prism when you return to a connection.
Recommendation
Download a Venue Pack before every competition night. It takes thirty seconds and eliminates the worst-case scenario (internet failure at the venue) entirely.
Can scores be changed after saving?
Yes - deliberately. The judge can re-enter a score for any image at any time during the competition night, up to the moment "Publish scores and finish" is clicked. Mistyped scores can be corrected without ending the competition. Once Publish is clicked, the competition is locked. An administrator can reopen it from the competition admin page if a correction is genuinely needed after the fact.
Can someone watch scores in real time?
Yes. Because every judge score is saved to the database immediately, any admin logged into Prism during the competition can open the competition admin page and see the running totals for images that have been scored so far. This also means that if the competition has to be split across two sessions, the partial results are preserved in full and the competition can be resumed without any data loss.