This page provides answers to some of the most Frequently Asked Questions about TBA.
TBA sources its data from a number of sources depending on many factors.
TBA gathers a great deal of information from official sources published by FIRST. This includes information about teams, events, match results, awards, as well as many match videos. Generally, official sources are available and used for more recent seasons.
Teams themselves can access and update some team-related data on TBA by using the Team Admin Dashboard.
TBA also gathers a great deal of information from crowdsourced sources. This includes information such as robot pictures, reveal videos, robot CAD files, and social media links. Additionally, some match videos recorded by partners or teams themselves are included.
Users will see links on various pages throughout TBA to suggest additional information, videos, or images.
Finally, a great deal of historical information available on TBA is not available from official sources and is instead crowdsourced from the community.
TBA strives to have the most up-to-date data available. For data provided by FIRST, TBA will make every effort to ensure that data is accurate and up to date, while maintaining an economically viable service to the community. Two key parts of that process are the refresh-rate and caching of data.
TBA regularly updates current-season data, while providing frequent updates to events-in-progress and less frequent updates to other events. Events in progress will often update within minutes, if not faster, while events that have concluded or not begun may take 24 hours, or longer, to update.
Please note that offseason or unofficial events may require manual updates from the event organizer.
Aside from the data refresh rate, TBA uses an aggressive caching system to provide our service at scale. As a result, data may be provided from one of our caches and appear stale temporarily. This is normal and expected behavior. You can check this by looking at the bottom of the page for the date and time each page was generated. Also refer to our API reference for more information on API response caching.
If you notice out of data, please contact us to help us keep TBA up to date.
TBA strives to have the most up-to-date and accurate data available. For data provided by FIRST, TBA will make every effort to ensure that data is accurate and up to date. If FIRST-provided data is incorrect, we encourage the affected team to contact FIRST directly to correct the information.
For crowdsourced data, please Contact Us with any data issues.
Teams seeking to update their team data shown on TBA must contact FIRST to update any of the following: Team name, location (city, state, country), sponsor information, or avatar. Images, team videos, and social media links can be updated or removed using the Team Admin Dashboard and any user can suggest new videos or links from the team page, subject to moderation.
If you wish to add to, or correct, historical event information not currently provided by FIRST, you can contact us providing a description of the change you wish made and any supporting documentation. For offseason or unofficial events that are not using FMS Sync, please contact the event organizer and ask them to reach out to us. For events with data provided by FIRST, please contact FIRST directly to correct the information.
In the rare case where event information has been changed after the conclusion of the event, TBA may retain older or incorrect information for some time. If several days have passed, please contact us to request that the information be updated.
The Blue Alliance welcomes feature requests from the community. If you have an idea for a new feature or improvement, please open an issue on our GitHub page with your suggestion. We value your input and will consider all valid feature requests for future development.
The Blue Alliance is a community-driven Open Source Project. We welcome contributions from the community to help improve the platform and make it more useful for everyone.
