Good morning, Judges!

I am very happy to share with you a new Judge website for event management: JudgeApps.

Many of you have probably used, or at least heard of, DCIFamily.  DCIFamily was written by former Level 4 Judge Adam Shaw, who is no longer actively judging, and thus, no longer actively supporting DCIFamily (but luckily, has been gracious enough to continue to host it for us. Thanks again, Adam!)

Fortunately, the Magic Judge Program has no shortage of skilled programmers, so in Adam’s wake, some wonderful judges stepped up to begin working on a replacement for event management.  The wheels were set in motion by Level 2 Judge James Bennett, who just happens to also be the Release Manager for Django, the web framework that both DCIF and its replacement are built on.  He was soon joined by Alexei Gousev, a fresh Level 3 Judge who is currently an intern with a small web company you have heard of… called Facebook.

Together, they’ve helped put together a great replacement for DCIF, called JudgeApps.  JudgeApps comes complete with support for Event Management, Judge Profiles, Messaging, Projects, Forums, and more.  All that’s missing is you! (And you’re probably not even missing!  If you have a DCIF account, you already have a JudgeApps account.)

OK, enough of the backstory, what does this mean for you?

First of all, I’d love if you could take a minute to verify that you have a JudgeApps account by logging in at http://apps.magicjudges.org with your DCIF username/password.  (Note that if you had any spaces in your DCIF name, those spaces are now underscores: _ ‘s ).  If you’ve never had a DCIF account, now’s a fine time to go ahead and get registered at http://apps.magicjudges.org/accounts/register/
Because of this initial onset of new accounts, it might take us a day or two to verify and approve your account, so please be patient. 🙂
If you need any help with your account, check out our Account Help page.

After that, for the vast majority of you, the new site doesn’t change a whole lot yet. The biggest change will be that you’ll be going to this new site to apply for things such as Grand Prix events and any other events that elect to use our officially supported event management system.  For more information about applying to events, you can read about Applying to Events.

Important: If you’ve been posting your events to DCIF, please STOP and post any new events to JudgeApps.  (Adam has graciously left DCIFamily up for a few extra months for us, but it won’t be up forever.)  Please post all new events on http://apps.magicjudges.org. Yes, the transition period while we have two sites for events will be a little awkward, but you can help us get through it by not putting any more events on DCIF. Thanks!  For more information about creating events, check out these brief notes on Creating Events.

Another feature that JudgeApps offers is Forums.  It has the event-specific forums you’re familiar with from DCIF, as well as some general forums and even private forums for projects or groups.  If you lead or are part of a project, and want a space to have your discussions, this seems like a great option for you!  For more information on project forums, read this: http://blogs.magicjudges.org/judgeapps/projects/

One of my absolute favorite features of the site is the ability to have new forum posts sent right to your email inbox AND be able to respond to them directly from your email.  You can also set up different notification settings based on the forum or individual topic.  For more information on notifications, read this: http://blogs.magicjudges.org/judgeapps/notifications/

Down the road, these forums will likely replace the general mailing list.  (Before anyone freaks out about that, please remember that you can get forum posts sent right to your inbox, and participate in the discussion from there by just replying to that email!)  This feature, combined with the ability to set different notification settings, should help you keep on top of the stuff you want to keep on top of without drowning in dozens of emails every day as the program continues to grow and and we share more and more ideas.

In the interim, feel free to use whatever method you prefer.  You’re welcome to keep using the mailing list, and you’re welcome to give the new forums a shot.  We’ll make sure that any [O]fficial announcements make their way out to the list for now, and will try to summarize the most important conversations from both the mailing list and the forums in MagicJudgeMonthly.

We have tons of great ideas for improvements and enhancements for the site, and they will continue to roll out over time.  Once in the site, you’ll notice that there is a “Provide Feedback” link in the main navigation.  Here, you can submit any Feature Requests or Bugs that you come think of or experience.  (When submitting bugs, please provide as much detail as you can!)

Lastly, I’d like to leave with one last round of thanks to the people who put in a lot of time behind the scenes over the past few months to get this new site ready.  There’s no way I could name everyone, but special thanks definitely go to:
– James Bennett & Alexei Gousev, for mad amounts of great coding work
– Adrian Estoup, Claudia Goertzen, Kevin Binswanger, Gareth Pye, and Tasha Jamison; some of our most active testers
– Steffen Baumgart and Denis Sokolov, for volunteering their design and UI skills
– All the Level 3+’s who’ve been using the site for communication for the past few weeks to help make sure it’s ready for you (with special shout outs to Arnaud Bourdoux, Nathan Brewer, Fabian Peck, Jurgen Baert, Adrian Estoup, Mark Brown, Chris Richter, Matteo Callegari, David de la Iglesia, and Edwin Zhang)

So please, pop on over to http://apps.magicjudges.org and verify you’ve got an account. Maybe apply to a Grand Prix or two while you’re there, and provide any feedback you can so that we can continue to improve our tools, and our entire program, together.

Cheers,

– Lems