Publication
Authorship
A byline is a claim about who did the work. It is worth getting right before it becomes permanent.
Who is an author
Someone who contributed to the design, the execution, the analysis, or the writing, and who takes responsibility for the result. A person who lent equipment, gave advice, or supervised is acknowledged in the contributions statement rather than listed as an author. Both of those are honest positions; only one of them is a byline.
Adding a co-author is an invitation
You name someone, and they receive an invitation they have to accept. Nothing is submitted while an invitation is outstanding. This exists so that work is never attributed to a person who did not agree to it.
Removing a co-author always requires approval from an officer, at every stage, and the person removed is always told. That holds even before the roster locks.
Author order
Order is set on its own screen, with the byline previewed as it will appear, and it has to be saved explicitly. Any current author can change it and everyone is notified when they do.
Each competition sets a date after which the roster locks. At that point the entry stores a snapshot of who was registered, because the team that competed is a historical fact. Changes after the lock need an officer and the advisor, with the reason recorded.
The contributions statement
Every published record carries one. It names what each author did and what any mentor did, in plain sentences. It is required, it is checked against the list of authors, and a reviewer is asked whether it matches what the paper describes.
Understating a mentor's role is the mistake to avoid. Experienced judges detect it, and they treat it as a question of integrity rather than presentation. A statement that says clearly what you did yourself is the strongest version of this section, and it is the same evidence that independent work is scored on.
Co-authors outside this organization
They appear on the byline as plain text, with their school, and they do not get an author page. They never agreed to a permanent page here and would have no way to control one.
After you leave
Your author page and your published records stay. If you archive your author page, the records stay published and your name becomes plain text on them, because they belong to your co-authors too. Removing a published record is never a decision one author makes alone.