In general, feedback you've received from the community does not count towards the official critique track. As noted here in Lesson 0 (specifically the point about starting at Lesson 1), students must start at the beginning of the course and ensure that they're not moving onto the next lesson or challenge until they have received the go-ahead as part of their official critique.

There are two main exceptions:

• As long as your Lesson 1 work fairly accurately shows where you're at with your work, you can go ahead and submit that for official critique as soon as you sign up without having to redo any of it.

• For those who completed their 250 box challenge prior to getting their Lesson 1 work marked as complete via official critique, they can submit their existing work plus an additional 50 boxes done after their L1 work was officially marked as complete, so that the TA providing their feedback will have clear examples of your current understanding/level of skill when giving you feedback, instead of working completely off work that may be out of date.

Ultimately we're quite strict about this because we cannot guarantee that feedback received from other members of the community will have addressed every major point, and so such issues could potentially come up later on, but in lessons where the issues may be harder to identify and deal with. Every lesson is designed towards bringing certain kinds of issues to the surface, so by ensuring that students complete the course with official critique from the beginning, we're helping to avoid issues that can greatly increase how much time a given TA needs to spend on critiquing a student's work, which in turn keeps our prices as low as possible.