The State of CCC3 Round One

For those of you who did not take part in today's CCC contest (IAUM-CCC 3 - Round One), let me say that we encountered some problems. This is a semi-official statement, about what happened and why.
Let me tell you what happened first. Around 13:40 (Iran time) this afternoon, we were in the computer room in our university, judging the submissions, answering clars, sending people their KOPCS passwords (!) and generally the contest was going on quite well. The response time of the judging system (JFKOPCS, machines, us, etc.) was good, and the contestants were actually solving all the problems. We had some laughs, and generally we were having fun. And then, the disaster struck (how melodramatic!)
Suddenly the Internet connectivity of the whole building (we were the only ones in it!) was lost. Due to the special nature of our judgment system, lost Internet access means no judgement at all, because unlike most other online programming contest systems, our judgement is not done on the server. Anyway, we knew that there were going to be tons of submissions and clars piling up, and the contestants had no idea what was happening.
From users' point of view, at around 215-220 minutes into the contest, the judges just vanished! They could have died in a meteor crash!
Let me stress this again. There was nothing wrong about KOPCS, judgment programs or judges. You might say that we should have had some other place to do the judgement from. But you see, our judges were our university instructors, and they had to be there to make the contest official, if for nothing else, which was not the case. They did all the judgement up until the catastrophic disconnection. I guess right now is a good time to thank Mr. Abrishami, Ms. Amintoosi and Mr. Niazi for their time.
Anyway, we lost the connection, so after a few minutes of trying to get the connection back to no avail, we headed home, extended the time, and started judging again.
This was the major problem from most contestants' point of view. But there was another problem. The input for problem E (the File Sharing problem) had a line deleted from it! As a result, people's codes were having runtime errors, or were giving wrong answers. There is no one to blame in this fiasco but me. Because it was me (Yaser Zhian Tabasy) who prepared the problem statement (the typo in the sample was also my handiwork!) wrote the solution code, generated the input and the output, and then uploaded the problem files to KOPCS. Now you can hate me for this, on top of every bug and nuisance you see in KOPCS!
Anyway, when the connection went off, I ran my own code again for the input data that was in KOPCS, and we were using to test people's code. It gave a runtime error! As I said, a line from the first test case was missing, it was wreaking havoc upon solutions!
Anyway, we had found the problem, but there was no way we could fix it! As I said, we headed home, and we started judging the 100+ submissions that had been accumulated. And I went to upload the correct input file. Anyway, we rejudged all the E submissions, and only a single person, Albus, had submitted the correct solution to E before the disaster, and he became the first anyway (but I'm sure he had a lot of grief over it, and I'm also half-sure that his rather late solution of problem G was because he had to resubmit E a few times while he had already solved it!)

Now, I know what a problematic programming contest feels like. I was there 4 years ago when the ICPC regional went downhill (does anyone else remember that?) But also remember this. We are here for fun, and for making friends (or in my case, enemies!) and a chance to measure ourselves against others, and learn something new.
We are not perfect. We had some runtime errors. We apologize.