Welcome back! This one is going to be a short one. Don’t get me wrong, a huge amount of effort went into JudgeApps these last two months, but most of it was invested in creating a robust infrastructure for exams and for the people working on the incredible amount of content involved.

Before I get to the update part of this post, a big shout-out to the JudgeApps Exam Content Squad (led by Louis Fernandes) for all the work that’s going into getting exams live ASAP.

As promised, some updates…

Exemplar

Wave 12 of exemplar introduced some changes, and those changes required some tweaks to the platform used to nominate judges. Starting with the current wave, all nominations have a character limit, so they can fit on the back of a token card. The limit is 1,500 characters for latin characters, and 800 characters in Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Phrase your recognitions carefully 😉

Event Calendars

To help judges managing all their event and conference applications, JudgeApps introduced a personal event calendar. If you go to your profile, you’ll find a new field: Events Calendar Links. These links can be loaded into calendar applications (such as Google Calendar or Outlook) so you can keep track of the events that interest you on your personal calendar. To avoid filling your calendar with a bunch of events that you don’t care about, the event calendar is limited to events you’ve applied to only. You can choose to get a calendar of events that you applied to, events to which your application was accepted, or both. My personal preference is to use the application and accepted calendars separately, but label them with different colors in my calendar app.

Reviews

After telling you that you can edit advancement reviews to fix spelling and such, some of you listened and did just that. And then you got an error that prevented you from saving those edits. That error is now fixed.

And while we’re talking about advancement reviews, we added some help messages to help you when writing those. When writing an advancement review for a judge, the “new level” field should reflect the level the judge is trying to advance to, not the one they’ll end up having (that’s what the “Successful Interview?” field and the exam score are for). So if, for example, a judge candidate has failed the L1 test, his new level should be noted as “1”, but the advancement won’t happen. We also added some clarifications about grading L3 qualities, for all you L3 panel leads out there.

Minor Fixes

• Have you ever seen a double arrow on a page’s sidebar? If you have, you won’t anymore.
• Some people with special characters in their names had problems getting new roles because the system didn’t know what to do with those. It does now.
• When a forum post is reported, a moderator gets a link to the relevant post. If the post is deleted, the link becomes broken and the moderator has no context. In addition to the post link, moderators will now get a link to the relevant forum thread. Just in case.

That’s it for today. As always, we encourage you to send us feedback if you find a bug, want a new feature, or just feel like sharing your thoughts.