JudgeApps Updates – April

| Emily Klopchic

The month of April brought a lot of changes to JudgeApps, including several small feature additions and a smattering of bug fixes.  Fun fact: 17 of these changes came from the feedback form!  We greatly appreciate any bug reports, feature requests, and thoughts you have on JudgeApps. We’re striving to make it better every day.

Features and New Additions

  • “See All” functionality for Exemplar Recognitions
    • Added an option to view all of the Exemplar Recognitions received by a specific judge on their profile page.  To limit loading times and keep pages looking more consistent, this is still loaded with the default of 10, but now there is an option to view more if desired.
  • Search by social media username
    • This was a simple update to allow users to search for others using a reddit, Facebook, or Twitter username that a judge can choose to include in their profile.  This makes it easier to line up these forums with who they are in the judge world easier to allow for private conversations about a post.
  • Search by email (L3)
    • Again, a simple update to allow Level 3 Judges to search for judges by email.  Since email is not a public field, but one that we do store, we have limited the visibility to those of a higher role.  This is particularly useful if you receive an email from a judge on your staff without a name attached.
  • Forum moderation: select all checkbox
    • We added a checkbox to select all when selecting topics to moderate.  Less clicking for our hard-working moderators!
  • Removed withdrawn applications from “My Upcoming Events and Applications”
    • They are now moved down into “My Events” should you wish to view your application.
  • Added link to submitted Exemplar recommendations
    • When viewing your current written Exemplars, the name of the person receiving the recommendation is now a link to their profile page.

Performance Updates

  • We’ve optimized the “recent forum topics” section of the home page, which means viewing a user’s profile is now faster and snappier.  This update also caused a small bug with some forums not appearing in this list when appropriate, which has since been corrected.
  • We improved the loading time of the account request approval page.

Bug Fixes and Backend Improvements

  • Previously, JudgeApps allowed users in the United States to register without specifying a state.  This is now a required field, and associates judges with the correct region.
  • Searching past events didn’t keep the searching filters set when navigating to the second page.  This has been resolved.
  • Advancement reviews couldn’t select the ‘new level’ as your current JudgeApps level.  For example, if you recently went from 1 to 2 and had your level updated immediately in Apps, it wouldn’t let a reviewer select that you were being promoted to level 2.  This has been fixed, and now we prompt to make sure the reviewer didn’t select the wrong number just in case.
  • On the “Reviews Received” screen, the “Reviewer” field was incorrectly showing the reviewee’s name – this is now showing the author of the review.
  • Editing an Exemplar Program recommendation was difficult if changing the subject of the recognition.  This has been made easier with filtering search on the field.
  • A few weeks ago, we started asking for new users’ Wizards Account username…but we weren’t actually recording that data.  Now we are.
  • Avatars expanded the event page in a silly way when you hovered over them.  This no longer happens.
  • If you clicked on the help link for reviews, it would point you to an old article that no longer existed.  That’s been updated and replaced with a new article link.
  • We removed a lot of Judge Center links across JudgeApps
  • We also made account request queue properly sort by date.
  • Django 1.9 compatibility blockers: we’ve cleared out a few of these to allow us to upgrade the technology behind JudgeApps when the time is ready!