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Custom Review Forms in Cyberchair

For the 2003 UK Workshop on Computational Intelligence (UKCI) we used cyberchair, a free web-based submission and review management system. I customised the paper review forms used with cyberchair. The bad news is this involves rewriting parts of some python scripts. The good news is that you probably don't really need to know any python to do it, as it's fairly obvious how it works if you've done any programming. This is one of the parts of cyberchair that are undocumented, so I am putting some notes here along with the code that I modified. This work was done in June 2003 on version 4 of cyberchair.

Please note that I do not necessarily recommend using cyberchair, and that its author will install and customise it for you, for a fee.

The original form provided with cyberchair can be found on the cyberchair web site. Here is the modified UKCI 2003 form. As you can see we kept the first two questions on the form (although we modified the text somewhat). Cyberchair generates summaries of the reviews based on these two questions, but doesn't do anything special with any of the others (it just records them).

Asking about the significance of a paper

This section desribes the steps involved in adding a question to the review form. We add a series of radio buttons which allow the reviewer to rate the significance of the paper.

Some general notes:

If you edit the form content, old reviews will no longer work properly since the interpretation of these files is entirely based on the position of the data in it. An error will occur if an old file does not contain as many entries as expected. You can safely remove old reviews by deleting the files in /submitted/reviews.

In general, after modifying the form-generating code you need to run /adm/crontab/genReviewers.py to regenerate the HTML pages. Then click reload in your browser.

Procedure:

Source Code

Here are the complete scripts needed for the UKCI 2003 review form.