Over the past week, the JudgeApps team has deployed several enhancements to the site.

Here’s a breakdown of what’s changed:

Event Links

For a long time, event leaders have been able to upload PDFs, spreadsheets, and other files to share important information with their staff. Recently, we’ve seen web-based services (like Google Sheets) emerge as a popular way of disseminating the same information. However, since web URLs aren’t attachments, it wasn’t possible to link directly to a Google Sheet in an event’s Files section. Although a Head Judge could export a Google Sheet to a PDF and upload that, that was more roundabout than necessary.

So we changed it!

A picture’s worth a thousand words, so here’s what it looks like:

As you can see, event admins can now upload Links as well as Files. This should make it easier to keep all the important information for an event in one place. We hope this also enable cool new ways of sharing information, like linking to event fact sheets, relevant blog articles, and more!

Thanks to Tom Kunc for writing this feature, as well as Alexei Gousev and Jernej Lipovec for code review. Shout out to Lems for providing the initial suggestion and inspiration for this feature.

Improved Emails for Event Application Decisions

Thanks to popular request, we’ve made two minor but significant changes to the emails you’ll receive when a judge manager processes your event applications.

First, we received feedback that the email subject lines were too generic, and we agreed. Rather than a a simple “Application Accepted!” or (sadly) “Application Declined”, email subjects will now specify what event you’ve received a decision for. (As a minor bonus, this should also help with threading issues in Gmail and similar clients.)

Second, we realized that the original templates for event acceptances were written before the Standby status existed as a regular practice. Being accepted as Standby means your application has been “accepted” from JudgeApps’ point of view, but from the human point of view, Standby feels quite distinct. It can be quite a shock when you get an “Application Accepted” email for some awesome event…only to open the email, read the “sponsorship” line, and realize that you’ve been put on Standby.

To address this, acceptance emails sent to Standby judges will now specify their Standby status in the subject line.

Thanks again to Tom for implementing these improvements!

Improved Judge Sorting

When sorting the master judge list by location, judges would be sorted by country, as one expects. But within a country, judges from the same city might appear at opposite ends of the list. That was an oversight, so Jernej fixed it. Yay!

Wrapping Up

In addition to these three great features, we’ve also made some changes to conference events and dramatically improved Exemplar filtering. (Look for a longer article about those changes in the near future!) Plus, we’re hard at work on some other awesome features. Check back soon for more JudgeApps news!