Added several new clarifications to our rules:

- 6.8.4. How to process embedded audio content
https://instantview.telegram.org/checklist#6-8-4-audio-players

- 6.11. What should and should not be used as the Subtitle:
https://instantview.telegram.org/checklist#6-11-subtitle

- Updated section on slideshows to make it more clear that articles consisting entirely of a gallery should not use a slideshows to present the photos in IV. Instead, simply use photos with captions following one another:
https://instantview.telegram.org/checklist#6-4-galleries-and-slideshows

1. We've added a Top Contributors section. You can now see who's winning the contest so far:
https://instantview.telegram.org/contest/top

Remember, everyone can help the contestants make their templates better by finding and reporting issues.
https://instantview.telegram.org/rules

2. We've cleaned up the list of target domains: removed duplicates and unsupportable websites, added ~150 new domains to the contest.

3. Two important additions to the Instant View Manual today:

3.1. The @datetime function was expanded with support for more complex date formats, including non-Gregorian dates. It should now be possible to correctly parse Jalali and Persian dates used on most websites:
https://instantview.telegram.org/docs#datetime

3.2. You can specify the code language used in Preformatted blocks using the data-language attribute. This will make preformatted blocks more easily readable when Telegram apps add support for code highlighting. Code highlighting currently works in the Preview section of the IV edtior.
https://instantview.telegram.org/docs#note-on-code-languages

4. Last but not least, we've simplified our rules regarding subtitles, making them less strict:
https://instantview.telegram.org/checklist#6-11-subtitle

Less than five days left until the end of the contest. May the best templates win!
https://instantview.telegram.org/contest/top

1. Added support for new functions:
- htmlencode
https://instantview.telegram.org/docs#htmlencode
- htmldecode
https://instantview.telegram.org/docs#htmldecode
- html_to_dom
https://instantview.telegram.org/docs#html-to-dom

2. Documented the recently supported Audio type:
https://instantview.telegram.org/docs#supported-types

See these clarifications in the checklist for tips on how to handle audio content:
https://instantview.telegram.org/checklist#6-8-4-audio-players

3. Also, don't miss the new 'Potentially difficult URLs' section. It holds all the URLs that were used to submit issues for the relevant contest domain.

A month flew by so fast! The contest is almost over. We will stop accepting new template submissions at midnight tomorrow – at 0:00 CET on June, 18.

Make sure your template is perfect by then. We've added another easy way to test existing templates for issues. The 'sample difficult links' page is now also accessible from Template pages:

We have decided to extend the competition for another 24 hours to give template creators an opportunity to deal with all the new issues that were reported in the last several hours.

We will stop accepting new templates at 00:01 CEST on June, 19 (this time, for real).

If you see any valid issues submitted for your template, we advise you to fix them and resubmit immediately. There's no need to wait for our admins to accept the issues and reject your template.

Thank you for participating in our template competition! Starting right now, we no longer accept new templates — this stage of the contest is over.

Please note that you can report issues with templates until 00:01 CEST on June, 20. This is to make sure that all templates, including those submitted in the last minutes get reviewed properly.

We will announce the winners as soon as our admins have processed all the issues on active templates.

Wow, that was a lot of issues you've reported! Please be patient while our admins finish processing them.

We will announce the winners when they are done.

Thank you very much for participating in our competition and for all the wonderful templates you have submitted.

Bringing articles from half of the World Wide Web to a single format is not an easy job. It's difficult for the template creators. It's difficult for those who design guidelines for this process. It's also difficult for the admins who try to resolve disputes based on those guidelines. One thing that's easy is to overlook important details.

Today we're adding a way for template creators to appeal our admins' decisions on accepted issues. If you think that an administrator made a mistake when accepting an issue for your template, you can now write a new comment and send it off using the 'Send Appeal' button.

Please try to make a good case for your template and cover as many details as possible in your comment. We will be around to re-evaluate the case. If the appeal has merit, your template may be restored to the contest.

(Please use this new tool with care. Template creators who send too many junk appeals may be disqualified from the contest.)

You have submitted almost 40,000 templates and more than 46,000 issues during this contest. Now we're almost done processing the last of them.

We are currently performing some final checks on the winning templates. The wait is almost over, results of the contest are coming early next week! (most likely 😊)

We are now sorting through the final remaining appeals. While we've always tried to be as consistent as possible in our decisions, the sheer range of websites and layouts that were covered by the contest made for some unavoidable mistakes and misunderstandings. We'd like to share some details on how we evaluate the severity of the different issues on this final stage so that everyone knows the reasons behind our decisions.

Our main concern is user experience on the receiving end of the IV. We have three main goals:
- To make sure Instant View pages represent information accurately and without omissions.
- To provide a better user experience as opposed to opening the content in a browser (lighter, faster, cleaner).
- To present Instant View to the users as the powerful and beautiful platform it is.

This means that some issues that could appear minor are actually much more serious than others — and vice versa.

SEVERITY SCALE
From worst case to best case

1. IVs are generated, but are missing parts of the content.
- Hey, look at this! What do you think? (sends link)
- (opens IV) Mneh, nothing special
- But.. I thought you loved cat GIFs! (blocks user)
- What GIFs?? 😱
(misinformation from IV)

2. IVs for dynamic pages or lists of articles.
- Congratulations on the press coverage! (sends link to a list of articles about a company)
- (opens IV, sees one cached result from a month ago) Sarcasm? 😡
(misinformation from IV)

3. IVs display content in the wrong order.
- Hey, I found an article about your video! (sends link)

Original article:

These videos are shit!
video1, video2
Watch something good instead...
video3

IV:

video 1, video2, video3
These videos are shit!
Watch something good instead...

- (opens IV) But.. My video3.. 😣 🔫
(misinformation from IV)

4. IVs are missing functional elements.
- Hey, here's a handy list of apps for your phone (sends link to article with store download buttons).
- Yeah, ugh. Very handy. Do I need to copy/paste their names into search?
- No, don't open it in the stupid IV, go to the website! 😬
(bad UX)

5. Poorly formatted IVs
- Look at this beautifully done in-depth report (sends link to IV with missing line breaks in quotes, poorly formatted tables, image captions set in plain text)
- (opens IV) Wow, this Telegram IV stuff is totally unreadable, and their design reminds me of ASCII-art. Back to the 90-ies! 😂😅
(bad impression from IV)

6. IV breaks if the source code of the original is using one-off formatting / the code has typos that are automatically corrected in the browser but break the IV.
- Check out these images (sends link)
- (opens IV) What images? I only see one.
- Wow, this never happened to me before. Other articles are OK. 🤔

While this is clearly a serious problem for the page in question, it's negligible for the template because the chances are so low that a user will hit just that article with the typo. A template that fixes a one-off case for one page is only marginally better than one that doesn't — because it processes exactly one page better.

At the same time, supporting all the possible typos is unfeasible. And we've frequently found that authors made their templates worse when trying to cover one-off formatting issues because this caused corrupted IVs in other unexpected places.

7. IVs are not generated for certain pages
- Check this out! (sends link)
- (no IV button is shown, opens link in the browser) OK. 😌
(no visible problems)


And now we'll get back to our dungeons to study the last remaining handful of appeals. Hang on tight!

The results of the First Instant View Contest are in. Congratulations to the winners and a big thank you to all the participants!

Tallying up the final results was no easy task. You've submitted a total of 37,507 templates — and our admins processed 29,482 issues and 402 appeals to find out the winners. This work is now completed and today we're launching Instant View for 2,274 websites! All thanks to you.

The winners

1. Pavel T. and Chuchu shared the first place with 40 winning templates each. The first prize will therefore be split between them, so both Pavel and Chuchu are getting a bonus of $5,000 in addition to the rewards for their templates.

2. Yuri Panarin took the second place with 38 templates and also earns a bonus prize of $5,000.

3. φ came in third with 35 templates. We decided to award a bronze prize of $2,500 to φ as recognition for his extended participation in the development of the IV ecosystem by way of thoughtful issue reports and insightful commentary.

You can see the full results of the contest on this page:
https://instantview.telegram.org/contest/top
We will contact everyone who won a prize about their rewards from the verified account +42454 in Telegram. All rewards will be sent out before August 31, 2017.

Publishing templates

Thanks to the wonderful work you did, we are publishing 2274 templates today. This means that as of this moment, quick and slick Instant View pages become available for all Telegram users who share links to articles from those websites.

Some templates will need to be modified due to layout changes on the original website after the contest ended — these will not be rolled out now. If you're the winner on one of these domains, we kindly ask you to resubmit an updated version of the template as soon as possible.

Template Feedback

When your template is live (shows 'version XX is live' in My Templates), users can send you feedback via the @previews bot that allows them to create issues right from Telegram. These issues will show up in the IV interface in the usual way.

When you submit an update, it will be reviewed by a Telegram admin before the current live version is replaced. The system is pretty basic now, but will evolve as time goes by.

Instant View Evolution

Thank you very much for your support, for all your comments and all the issues you've identified and fixed. You did a great job! Thanks to your input, we've learned a lot about the internet and about the tools we're missing to process all the content on its countless websites. We've tried to come up with solutions when possible, adding interfaces and new options during the course of the contest. Working on this felt much like building an airplane in mid-air. But this was just the first step. Now that we have an airplane — it's time to turn it into a spaceship.

In the coming months we're going to:
- Upgrade the IV engine so that it becomes more flexible, more intelligent and gets better support for more kinds of content.
- Refine our IV criteria for more clarity and consistency, and come up with a brand new super-inclusive checklist.
- Announce the next contest on this channel.

Join us!

We couldn't have come this far without you, and now we need your help in figuring out how to make the next Instant View contest the stuff of legends.

All contestants are welcome to join our new public group on Telegram and post their suggestions for the present and future of the IV infrastructure with the tag #IVsuggestion (hint: if you have plenty to say, using Telegra.ph may be a good idea).

Join the discussion here:
https://t.me/IVpublic

And congratulations again on completing the first stage of this journey!

Just in case you missed this: the results of the contest are fixed.

Feel free to reupload an updated version of your template if the users have already sent you any issues — this will not change your position on the leaderboards. Nothing will until the next contest starts.

(Check out this page for an example of what will happen if you resubmit: https://instantview.telegram.org/contest/nplus1.ru/)

Announcing the Instant View 2.0 Template Competition: two months, $300,000+ in prizes, $100 per template:
instantview.telegram.org/contest

Telegram IV 2.0 Competition just started! 4 Feb-4 Apr 2019, $300,000 in prizes, $100 per template + $10,000 / $5,000 to top 2 contributors.

Check out the new list of domains: https://instantview.telegram.org/contest

We included some domains from the 2017 contest in the first batch. Every 10 days we'll be adding 500 more domains.

We’ve clarified and expanded the Checklist based on the issues we’re seeing in the contest so far.

Changelog:
https://instantview.telegram.org/checklist#feb-6

- Related Articles (6.3.2). Considerably expanded guidelines. Now obligatory to put related links into the new "Related articles" block, provided they are technically identifiable in the source. See the full details:
https://instantview.telegram.org/checklist#6-3-2-related-articles

- Cover Images (6.2.2). Added conditions when covers are obligatory:
https://instantview.telegram.org/checklist#6-2-2-cover-images

- Galleries and Slideshows (6.2.3). Added detailed explanations on gallery usage:
https://instantview.telegram.org/checklist#6-2-3-galleries-and-slideshows

There was an issue that could prevent users from creating appeals on admin decisions in certain cases. It is now fixed.

You can create appeals for issues on domains where no winner was officially announced.

500 fresh domains were just added to the contest. Get them while they’re hot!

Note that each template has a 72-hour window for reporting issues, regardless of when it was submitted.

E.g., if a template was submitted 20 minutes before the reporting period for the currently winning template ends, you still have 3 days to submit issues for that new template. Please do this – it will help our arbiters reach a decision faster if the winning candidate gets disqualified.

Please do NOT use issues on other templates to report problems with the winning candidate.

We've just added 500 new domains. Grab them now – and don't forget to check competing templates for issues.

Try the new Top Contributors page to see how well you are doing in the contest:
https://instantview.telegram.org/contest/top