Forem: Geoff Creates

The first-time Hackathon Project that was a challenge, a success, but afterwards YouTube banned it?!

Geoff Creates — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 14:14:31 +0000

This is a submission for the World's Largest Hackathon Writing Challenge: Beyond the Code.

I Entered My First Hackathon… and had success despite challenges - But why did the video get banned by YouTube?

⚡ TL;DR

I entered my first hackathon. Built a QR code for video tool I was proud of.

Uploaded a demo video to YouTube as required.

Was permanently banned — without warning.

So what happened? Read on.

This developed into a long post, so I learned how to put a TOC:

📚 Table of Contents

My First Hackathon
The Tool I Built
My Hackathon Experience
The Submission Video
My Tale of Woe and The YouTube Block
My Appeal
The YouTube Termination
What I Think Happened
Reflections

My First Hackathon

How unfortunate, to try my first ever Hackathon and end up terminated from YouTube forever!

This was my first-ever hackathon. I wasn’t sure I could finish. But I did — and I was proud. I submitted my project on time, followed the rules, including posting a short video to demo how it worked.

Then YouTube terminated my entire channel account. No warning. No ‘three strikes’. Just gone. For life!

The Tool I Built

I built QRCodr.com — a tool that helps creators generate animated QR codes for their content. Unlike motionless QR codes in print form, mine can move on-screen in a subtle way that encourages interaction. Viewers can scan, or screenshot and come back later.

Project entry: QRCodr on Devpost

Why I built it

I needed a project for this event ‘The World’s Largest Hackathon' presented by Bolt.new. I had been curious about QR Codes for some time. I saw still codes on-screen and in-video as a lost opportunity. Why not take advantage of the platform and make it more interesting and eye-catching with animation?

This interest was enough for me to notice a few YouTube creators starting to use QR Codes more often, but always still, never inviting with motion.

The idea was to improve user experience, not disrupt it.

If it worked, it would help some people and I could perhaps create a little business or side hustle out of it.

My Hackathon Experience

Any experienced programmer would scoff at my naivety. You might like to skip this section.

A total newbie! But I knew I didn’t know much at all, lol. Close to nothing in fact. That was most of the reason for deciding to do it. I thought maybe I can do it. Maybe if I fail, at least I’ll take some steps towards some form of competence – and for sure gain some learning opportunities. It wasn’t even good timing for me, but I decided the Hackathon would give me a push to do it.

I was unable to start for the first five days, due to an unrelated project and family commitments. Then on the sixth…

At first, I was excited. My first prompt in Bolt.new whirring away, spinning, building, things happening!

Then reality set in. Oh, this thing doesn’t work. What’s this error mean? Try and try.

Before, I couldn’t have spelt RLS, let alone know that it stood for Row Level Security, lol! I feel I now know a lot more about it, why it’s necessary and important, thanks to this project.

After five hours battling away, mostly out of my depth and heavily consulting with ChatGPT, it seemed I’d made it. Wondering if anyone else had this much difficulty getting Supabase set up and integrated to work how I needed, I thought I’d search online to see. A brutal blow: I quickly found a couple of YouTube videos showing people doing it from Bolt.new in five minutes. Ouch.

Should I have sought help?

It wasn’t that I wanted to do the project in isolation. I know proximity is power. Learning opportunities are better shared I think. I had searched on River to see if I could find other builders near me. The closest seemed to be a two-hour flight away. Not really an option. Oh well, online community it is! Unfortunately I don’t really ‘get’ Discord (still). Bolt.new’s YouTube channel became quite an obsession.

I was proud of my app. I was so happy when I finally achieved the stepped gradient background I was so keen to get, so as to mimic the modern gradient look and achieve the blocky appearance relating to the blocky nature of the QR code (the 'modules'). When I explain that I did this with code rather than a background image, and that the software’ hung onto’ an incorrect concept I had mistakenly given in my first prompt, you might appreciate it a little more than at first glance. I can change the start and end hex colors and block size.

At first Bolt hadn't appreciated what I was trying to achieve (bad prompt!). Many attempted correcting prompts later I decided, while the look was close to what I envisioned, the only option was to go back to an earlier automatic backup prior to that first prompt. It just wouldn't extract one part of the code that was giving a different look to what I wanted. This was compounded because I couldn’t roll back - I tried but it crashed.

I built all this on a ten year old tablet that was really struggling, and I often had to reset the view because the Bolt preview would go blank with an occasional flash of white!

There were other difficulties for sure. I’ve got to do what from where? Why can the AI do this and not that? Why CLI (and what does that even stand for)? Comical from an experienced coder’s point of view I imagine, lol.

All that debugging cost me A LOT of tokens. I had to buy more just to keep going. I wasn’t disappointed, I had my eye on the prise: a finished product! Also, I had to think of a way to motivate creators to want to use my product. What was the problem it could solve?

How could I pose a strong enough motivation for them to want it? Just moving QR codes – that’s a feature – what’s the real benefit? Ah yes, it gives another way, a visual way right there in-view, to bring to them viewers who don’t go searching for links hidden away in the description or in Bios during the video, and just go onto the next video or forget to look later.
And what’s more, it can be actionable right when and where they’ve warmed up their audience via their call to action!

Then a few days later Bolt came through in heroic fashion with a heap of free tokens for the final weekend. Thanks Bolt (and the guys and gals at StackBlitz) that was sweet! It made all the difference. Prompt and build bolder and faster!

In the last few hours of the project, shortened by the desire to attend a family funeral on the last day, I was making harsh scope finalisation decisions and cutting through to my core vision. It has to function! Shortcuts in good design must be made against the clock! "No, I told you I don't want to build a new table, there's only hours left!" It was neck and neck. Could I make it work fully enough to be a valid entry?

The Submission Video

Yes! I think I did it! Just one hour left to make the video. Here goes…

I made and uploaded the video, completed the entry details, and submitted the project with ten minutes to spare. Phew!

Looking back, you would laugh. Many hackathons take place over a weekend, I gather, and here am I using as much as I could of an entire month to bring my little idea to life. But I am proud of my achievement, and I am changed. I have learned so much!

In the demo video, I showed a simple walkthrough of the tool. I showed how easy it is to use – not heaps of settings and choices to make. That bugged me when I used existing tools. With a URL entry – I chose Bolt.new, the hackathon sponsor – and an AI prompt for styling, I showed how to generate a QR code and then animate it. All very easy. I showed a few other features and neat things I had built in.

The next day (July 1st), I went back to YouTube to get the link to proudly send to a friend to show what I had made.

My Tale of Woe and The YouTube Block

Within hours, late that same night I saw my YouTube account was blocked.

Curious and a little disturbed, I started to write up some kind of protest note, but as midnight ticked over I lost the ability to continue it, or it timed out. So the next day I investigated further, searched for and found a one-and-only email from YouTube.

Ah… It dawned on me.
I guessed it must be because I showed a QR code, and some automated bot had a problem with that.

I wrote up an appeal.

“When a human sees it was all a legitimate part of a Hackathon widely discussed on YouTube, they’ll understand”, I thought. “Strange that they thought it was serious enough to not go through all steps and warnings their policy videos explained would happen. I’d better ask for input or recommendations to make sure my (potential future) customers don’t have that problem either!”

My Appeal

Here is my appeal below. I had to write it a few times due to the tight 800 character limit (by now, you have noticed I’m verbose!). It's still a little more compressed than I would have liked.

Thanks for the right to appeal. This video was a requirement for entry into a Hackathon, see Bolt.new's YouTube channel. For this, I developed a SaaS that animates QR Codes, to take advantage of the ability to animate them on-screen rather than be still in print media. I prepared a walk-through to show how it works. In the demonstration, I created an animated QR Code that directs to Bolt.New (the sponsor). Several channels display QR Codes (eg. HubSpot’s My First Million) and animating them could enrich the digital environment as it enhances viewer engagement without disrupting platform flow. Viewers can screen copy, continue watching and scan later in their photo roll. I didn’t intend to violate a policy and respectfully ask for reinstatement. Do you have related advice for my app or customers?

The YouTube Termination

The day after (July 2), the email arrived.

Utter shock. Disbelief.

The email response from YouTube. A. Life. Ban?!

Emotional? Yes I was.

My YouTube account was permanently terminated under their spam, scams, and deceptive practices policy. I received no strikes, no warnings — just a flat rejection of my appeal and information saying I’ll never be allowed a channel on the platform.

I clicked through to learn more about Terminations. This is the sort of company with whom I have apparently been put, according to YouTube Community Guidelines:

Reasons channels or accounts can be terminated:

Repeated violations of the Community Guidelines or Terms of Service across any form of content (like repeatedly posting abusive, hateful, and/or harassing videos or comments)

A single case of severe abuse (such as predatory behavior, spam, or pornography)

Dedication to a policy violation (like hate speech, harassment, or impersonation)

Well the video certainly doesn’t do any of those things. Are you curious? Check it out here for yourself:

Watch the full video on Netlify

(Sorry, there is no sound - I didn't have time to put any during the hackathon!)

So you see, I’ve already built my second project on Bolt.new! This one is a one-page website that hosts my so-HOT-it-got-me-banned-from-YouTube Video! (Giggles)

I'm proud of that one too - I made it very quickly with Bolt.new.

I told you this experienced changed me!

So Why the Lifetime Termination?

My video itself doesn’t seem to violate the given reasons for immediate termination, and in my appeal I invited them to give guidelines for the app and my future customers (clumsily perhaps, but given the limited number of characters allowed, it wasn’t easy). One can only ask “why?"

What I Think Happened

Maybe concern wasn’t the video itself, but the nature of the tool it demonstrated?

The following had not even occurred to me during creation:

I demonstrated a tool that — if misused — could do harm.

Like any tool, this could be used irresponsibly — but I demonstrated a legitimate, creative use case (in the video), and even invited input to make the app safer (in my appeal).

In the context of a first time builder in a hackathon, I had never imagined such a negative take on it.

Reflections

I honestly didn’t expect anyone to see the video — hopefully a hackathon judge or two. That’s it.

I certainly didn’t imagine YouTube’s automated systems existed and would flag it as dangerous.

In fact, I thought the opposite: that I’d have to fight to get people to notice what I’d built. That’s why I tried to make the marketing part stand out.
Looking back, maybe I leaned too far into the dramatic. But at the time, it felt like my project would be lost in the thousands of projects in this, the World's Largest Hackathon, a mere 'drop in the ocean'.

Ironically, maybe it was that “drop” that triggered a permanent platform ban.

Going forward, I could work collaboratively with those who know about making these things safe.

I have since learned that such a thing exists as “Web Risk” which apparently is “an enterprise security product that lets your client applications check URLs against Google's constantly updated lists of unsafe web resources.” With some APIs and payment of fees for access, and with my newfound programming super-power, I think I could check target URLs against this list before activating them.

Perhaps they thought some of the language on my “Built with Bolt” website was adversarial. I appreciate that this is concerning (only now with this hindsight context), but the phrasing was marketing-oriented, not confrontational or conspiratorial. At least, that was my intent at the time.

In evidence of this, at the same time, my website also says:

Guide your interested viewers:
"Screenshot this video, keep watching now, and scan the QR later.”

You can see it unchanged for yourself (projects must not be changed to allow judging to take place on the finished product at the end of the hackathon).

There is no intent to drive viewers off-platform or stop views.

Just intent to create a more interesting and easier way for viewers to connect to creators’ offers - in parallel to links they already put in the description or bio. The same creator is in control of both. Both methods can be used in a way that follows YouTube’s rules — the responsibility lies with the creators, not with me as the toolmaker.

Again, if you read my project on Devpost, you will see I intended it as a positive thing for social video. (With maybe only a single, slight hint at that marketing angle.) Here's the link again for ease of access:

Project entry: QRCodr on Devpost

Another thing I probably did wrong which may have caused this, is that I clicked the 'for children' checkbox, thinking that it was like a TV-G rating, meaning it is suitable for all ages, nothing in it represented a problem for any age group. I wonder if this means instead that the channel is specifically to be shown to children? Maybe this combined with the dynamic QR code ended up being a problem for the IA review(s)? I just don't know, but it is a blow for someone trying to do this for the first time!

The Future? I am Not Going to Stop!

I’m still going to keep building.

I’ve already built my second project – that hosts my banned video. Please check it out on Netlify, that link again here for convenience:
The Hackathon Video That Got My YouTube Channel Terminated
(Yes, I didn't have time during the hackathon to put a sound track to it!)

I’m not stopping with QRCodr.com either.
I believe in it.

I’m sharing all this because I believe in what I built. A blow like this should kill it. But I still think QRCodr can be useful — especially for people making video content who want better connection, better conversion, better QR code solutions.

A little ask:

If you work at YouTube — or you know someone who does — I’d be incredibly grateful if you could help me get this looked at again.

Anyone have some advice to offer me? (Thanks in advance.)

And to anyone in the community who’s ever been hit with an unexpected takedown: You’re not alone. Tell us your story in reply here.

Final thoughts

Finally, thank you so much to Bolt.new and the hackathon sponsors. You gave me a chance to learn and grow, and that is a wonderful gift.

My First Hackathon was great, but it didn't all go well…

Geoff Creates — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 13:50:03 +0000

This is a submission for the World's Largest Hackathon Writing Challenge: Building with Bolt.

The Hackathon Project That Taught Me Some AI assisted Coding and Life Lessons

⚡ TL;DR

I entered my first hackathon. Built a QR code for video tool I was proud of.

Uploaded a demo video to YouTube as required.

What a great experience. But it didn't all go well...

So what happened? Read on.

This developed into a long-ish post, so I learned how to put a TOC:

📚 Table of Contents

My First Hackathon
The Tool I Built
My Hackathon Experience
My Walkthrough Video

My First Hackathon

I Entered My First Hackathon… and quickly learned that AI doesn't do Everything!

This Hackathon was full of highs and lows, and it forced me to learn and grow - exactly what I was hoping for. But the aftermath wasn't at all expected!

I wasn't entirely happy with the project when time ran out. But I sure had a feeling of jubilation!

The Tool I Built

Before you go to check it out (if you do) let me just say everything didn't all go as expected.

Project entry: QRCodr on Devpost

Why I built it

I needed a project for this event ‘The World’s Largest Hackathon” presented by Bolt.new. I had been curious about QR Codes for some time. I saw still codes on-screen and in-video as a lost opportunity. Why not take advantage of the platform and make it more interesting and eye-catching with animation?

This interest was enough for me to notice a few YouTube creators starting to use QR Codes more often, but always still, never inviting with motion.

The idea was to improve user experience, not disrupt it.

If it worked, it would help some people and I could perhaps create a little business out of it.

My Hackathon Experience

Any experienced programmer would scoff at my naivety. You might like to skip this section.

I was unable to start for the first five days, due to an unrelated project and family commitments. Then on the sixth day…

At first, I was excited. My first prompt in Bolt.new whirring away, spinning, building, things happening!

Then reality set in. Oh, this thing doesn’t work. What’s this error mean? Try and try.

Before, I couldn’t have spelt RLS, let alone know that it stood for Row Level Security, lol! I feel I now know a lot more about it, why it’s necessary and important, thanks to this project.

Should I have sought help?

It wasn’t that I wanted to do the project in isolation. I know proximity is power. Learning opportunities are better shared I think. I had searched on River to see if I could find other builders near me. The closest seemed to be a two-hour flight away. Not really an option. Oh well, online community it is! Unfortunately I don’t really ‘get’ discord (still - see? Such a newbie). Bolt.new’s YouTube channel became quite an obsession.

Also, I had to think of a way to motivate creators to want to use my product. What was the problem it could solve? (Hmm, product first, customers later - anyone had that problem before?!Lol.)

How could I pose a strong enough motivation for them (future customers) to want my little project? Just moving QR codes – that’s a feature – what’s the real benefit? Ah yes, it gives another way, a visual way right there in-view, to bring to them viewers who don’t go searching for links hidden away in the description or in Bios during or forget to look later.
And what’s more, it can be actionable right when and where they’ve warmed up their audience via their call to action!

I was proud of my app. I was so happy when I finally achieved the stepped gradient I was so keen to get, so as to mimic the modern gradient look and achieve the blocky appearance relating to the blocky nature of the QR code (the 'modules'). When I explain that I did this with code rather than a background image, and that the software’ hung onto’ an incorrect concept I had mistakenly given in my first prompt, you might appreciate it a little more than at first glance. I can change the start and end hex colors and block size.

I built all this on a ten year old tablet that was really struggling, and I often had to reset the view because the Bolt preview would go blank with an occasional flash of white!
There were other difficulties for sure. I’ve got to do what from where? Why can the AI do this and not that? Why CLI (and what does that even stand for)? Comical from an experienced coder’s point of view I imagine, lol.

All that debugging cost me A LOT of tokens. I had to buy more just to keep going. I wasn’t disappointed, I had my eye on the prize: a finished product!

Then a few days later Bolt came through in heroic fashion with a heap of free tokens for the final weekend. Thanks Bolt (and the guys and gals at StackBlitz) that was sweet! It made all the difference. Prompt and build bolder and faster!

In the last few hours of the project, shortened by the desire to attend a family funeral on the last day, I was making harsh scope decisions and cutting through to my core vision. It has to function! Shortcuts in good design must be made against the clock! "No, I told you I don't want to build a new database table, we have to find another way, there's only hours left!" (Or similar, is what I wrote more than once to my AI team mate.) I had already made changes or added a table once before that point. It took me hours and made my head hurt. (Again, experienced coders, insert giggle here!) But There wasn't time. It was neck and neck. Could I make it work fully enough to be a valid entry?

Let's develop a new idea (I was scrambling to make it work against the clock and against recommended design). We need a work around so I don't need to create a new table. How about this variable? We don't need that any more at this point in the workflow... Can I get it to work and finish everything (or at least everything my trimmed scope became)?

Yes! I think I did it! Just one hour left to make the video. Here goes…

I submitted the project with ten minutes to spare. Phew!

Looking back, you would laugh. Many hackathons take place over a weekend, I gather, and here am I using as much I could of an entire month to bring my little idea to life. But I am proud of my achievement, and I am changed. I have learned so much!

My Walkthrough Video

The next day (July 1st), I went back to YouTube to get the link to proudly send to a friend to show what I had made.

I had thought for me, that this was a dramatic experience. At time there was jubilation, like "wow, that looks great, I can't believe I made that". At times there were lows, like "OMG, I've spend a day on this and I can't see if am any closer to it working". My AI team mate would for hours of debugging say "you're doing great, you are 90% of the way there". A great cheerleader.

Finally, I was jubilant. I actually succeeded. I submitted my project, with 10 minutes to spare before the final deadline, and it worked!

But, the drama wasn't over - See my Beyond the Code submission.

Beyond the code - Banned for Life!