Welcome to another JudgeApps update, where you can find everything that happened during the second half of July. Very little happened during this time, at least as far as you – the users – are concerned, but great things are coming in the future which are still on the works.

Performance

We did some behind-the-scenes-server-wizardry that should improve the performance of our beloved JudgeApps. We did some upgrades to the framework used to run the site, and some other tools that we use with it.

When searching for stuff (judges, for example) with multiple criteria, we did the search in a repetitive and inefficient manner. Now the search criteria are created just once, which is much more efficient!

Forums

We fixed a bug in the way we handle actions that change which forums you might have access to (for example, changing regions, joining events, or leaving a project). To do so, we changed how we handle the cache (data we save for easier access). Now the cache gets reset as soon as a change happens, preventing a situation where (for example) you know you’re part of an event, but the site isn’t showing you the event forum yet.

Pagination

Pagi-what? Pagination is the process of dividing a lot of data into pages, for easier reading. When you get 12 pages with 20 forum posts each, instead of a 225-post long list, that’s pagination doing its job.

We got some complaints about pages generating “this page doesn’t exist” errors, so we started investigating. Apparently, we weren’t handling multiple criteria well (when you choose multiple options for the same filter), so if you looked for a GP HJ in all the European regions, and tried to go to the second page, the address of the page would get messed up and wouldn’t work. We fixed that.

Event Bug Fixes

There were two problems that we fixed with event pages.

When a question field has a maximum of 255 characters, it now actually checks that there are no more than 255 characters. Why 255 characters, and not, lets say, 250? That’s an interesting topic by itself, but it has nothing to do with JudgeApps.

While creating an event, and adding application questions, an error would occur sometimes that crash everything and would create an event without a forum. We fixed the crashing part, but just for good measures, we moved the forum creation to happen before the crashing part. Just in case…

Development Tools Improvements

While this is not something you observe directly, we made some improvements to the tools we use to develop and track changes when working on the code. By doing so, we’re able to react faster, better, and avoid errors, which ultimately give you a better service.

Feedback

No changes here. Just the usual “Give us feedback!” 🙂