I rebuilt Open Creativity Scoring
Hey everybody,
I rewrote openscoring.du.edu from the ground up. The old site is gone; the new one is live now. Same URL, same API, same (even worse?) lack of a design eye, but very different under the hood. That's probably all that needs sharing, but details below.
Why
If you've uploaded a few hundred responses and stared at a blank screen wondering whether scoring was still working — that's the problem this rebuild fixes. The old site was built on a Python framework that rendered everything server-side. Large files would block the process, give you zero feedback, and eventually time out.
The Streamlit bulk scoring app I set up last year was a band-aid for this. It worked, but maintaining two separate scoring interfaces wasn't sustainable.
What's different
Large file scoring works now. The new site chunks your data into batches — 20 rows at a time for Ocsai, 400 for semantic scoring — and streams results into the table as each batch finishes. There's a progress bar. You can watch your scores come in. No more blank screens, no more timeouts, no more switching to the Streamlit app for big jobs.
There are a few other changes. 'Upload' and 'Paste' aren't separate scoring pages. The copy text is less of a wall of text. The results are sortable. But those don't need mention - hopefully it just works.
This is on top of a redesign of a troublesome caching system a few weeks ago, which was the root of most downtime that we've had in the past.
I know, the design is bombastic. I'll tinker with it over time, but I wanted to get the functionality out the door and worry about subtlety later.
What hasn't changed
The API is identical. Same endpoints, same parameters, same models. If you're calling OCS programmatically through Python, R, or anything else, nothing changes on your end.
Bugs
A full rewrite means there are bugs I haven't found yet. If something looks wrong, doesn't work, or behaves differently than the old site in a way that seems unintentional, please let me know at peter.organisciak@du.edu. I'd rather hear about it than not.
— Peter
