“This is a 2011 review.”

If those words don’t mean anything to you, consider yourself lucky. This phrase is an inside joke amongst older judges (and trust me, if you get it, you are now considered old in the Judge Program).

Back in 2011, judges writing reviews in the Judge Center noticed that the drop down selector for the “observation date” year stopped at 2010. No 2011, no 2012, and most certainly not 2017. Strangely, this did not affect the “entered date” for reviews, which was not an editable field, and simply corresponded to the actual date that the review was entered. Because of [technobabble] reasons, this seemingly simple problem could not be fixed, and judges began afixing the above phrase to their reviews to make absolute certain for posterity when the event in question took place.

“This is a 2011 review” gave way to “This is a 2012 review.” Yes, this problem persisted for over a year! The phrase became a part of judge slang, added to the end of verbal feedback, whether real or a joke. “You make a better door than a window. This is a 2012 review.” These days, it’s a joke that doesn’t get much play as we’re a few years removed from the problem, but feel free to try it out on an older judge and see their eyes light up with nostalgia for a simpler time.

Here we are in 2017 and we finally have a replacement for the aging Judge Center in the form of JudgeApps. The “2010 bug” shows just how little foresight there was for the future of Judge Center. The website probably wasn’t expected to last that long without overhauls, and those overhauls just never materialized, leaving us with a ten-year old system with no means to update it.

The neat thing about JudgeApps is that there are many people working on it, pretty much non-stop. We’ve already seen great additions to the website such as the Judge Map, Exemplar, Advanced Roles, and now finally Reviews. Yes, Reviews have finally come to JudgeApps! To read more more about the technical aspects of JudgeApps Reviews from the Lead Developer, L3 Paul Baranay, go here.

It’s a whole new world, ladies and gentlemen. Time to explore the sandbox. People are already reporting positive results with the new variable box feature. That’s right. You are no longer constrained to “Strengths/Areas for Improvement/Comments” or trying to come up with artificial ways to use or circumvent those boxes. And best part of all this is that we won’t be facing any situations like the 2010 bug. JudgeApps Reviews are malleable. If there’s a feature that we want to add, we can add them. Go write a review! Talk about your experiences at the Review Revue Facebook Group!