Hello judges! Spring is about renewal, and with that spirit in mind, we made some big changes to JudgeApps. From a major framework update to using JudgeApps as an authentication service, March was a busy month.

We also want to give a huge shoutout to our old-new “boss”, the new leader of the Technology Sphere, Paul Baranay. And of course, thank Jason Lemahieu for all the great work!

Exams

As most of you know, testing and certification moved from the now phased out Judge Center to JudgeApps. Earlier this year we announced that L1 practice and certification exams were live for you to take (as well as L3 preliminary exams). The move was finalized lately with the activation of L2 certification and practice exams. The migration required a lot of effort from a lot of people, and we would like to thank each and everyone involved. Be it creating the testing platform, reviewing hundreds of questions or translating them into nine different languages, the JudgeApps development and the Exam Content teams worked hard to create a new and improved testing system. To everyone involved, you’re awesome people. Thank you!

OpenID Connect (OIDC)

Quoi? Open what connect? What does it even mean? Well… It means JudgeApps can now be used as an authentication service. Great! Still no idea what it means…

You know how you go to a website that requires you to sign up, and then you see a “Connect with Facebook” or “Sign in with Google” button, you click on it, and BAM! you’re in? It’s similar, but uses your JudgeApps account. If you used the Purple Fox EoR app lately, you were probably told that you’ll need to sign in using your JudgeApps account. That’s the new OpenID Connect in action. We hope this will allow developers to create apps that use this newly available tool  to better fit the applications to the judges using them. The options are limitless, and we’re excited to see what new applications this service will inspire.

User Photos

User photos have been upgraded to have a more prominent role while using JudgeApps. If you do not have a photo on JudgeApps and you apply to an event (except a conference), a reminder will be shown in the application page, as well as a link to the photo uploading page. While having a photo isn’t mandatory, it certainly helps when you’re evaluated by the event staff, and will help other judges recognize you at the event itself, so you should probably get one. A small fix was added to the user profile to allow users to delete their photo, even if they don’t have more than one.

Events

Other than user photo warnings, events got some attention this past month. As part of our ongoing effort to prevent your information from being publicly available, we recently changed access to the list of events (past, current, and future), to be accessible to logged in judges only. Before this change, anyone with a link to the list could access it and get information about dates and locations of events. While GPs and prereleases are publicly available, JudgeApps is also used to plan conferences or social gatherings, which shouldn’t be accessible to everyone.

We also fixed a bug that prevented users from deleting events because of the event forum being protected from deletion.

Django 2.0

This probably won’t say much to most of you, but we upgraded the framework on which JudgeApps is implemented to Django 2.0. While it has no noticeable changes for most users, we believe it’s important for you to know that we’re now using a newer framework that supports newer packages and will be more compatible with future developments. A change this big required a lot of work, but we’re confident it was worth it.

Quality of Life Improvements

We made some small changes/fixes to make your JudgeApps experience a bit more enjoyable.

• When writing an advancement review, clicking the “Save and Continue Editing” button no longer resets the “New level” field to its default value of “–”. (thanks Vincent for bringing it to our attention!)
• We liked Kyle’s idea, and increased the size of text boxes for entering exemplar and reviews.

We get your feedback and do whatever we can to make JudgeApps better, so if you have any problems, suggestions, or just some thoughts to share, fill the form and press “Submit” 🙂