Good morning JudgeApps!

Welcome back to a new edition of the JudgeApps blog. This month we have updates to reviews, exams and a small quality-of-life bug fix.

Also, while not directly related to a technical issue, we have retired the “Grand Prix Solicitations and Selected Staffs” forum. This forum is no longer needed, as JudgeApps already sends out notifications directly and the forum provides no additional benefits.

Reviews

There’s a new review type for RCs and admins called Administrative Level Change. This was created to let relevant people edit judge levels if needed, in order to fix any errors that might have been introduced during an advancement review, or if a judge lapses erroneously. Most folks will never see a review of this type, but if you do, now you know what it means!

We have also made it easier to share reviews. Now, when you share your reviews with another judge, the share will include a hyperlink. This link will connect to an already filtered list of reviews by the sharing judge, saving time and improving judges’ ability to access information.

Exams

On the exams area of things, we have more updates this month.

To start, we have made two changes to the way exams are getting generated. An info page was added to every exam, explaining to applicants what they are getting into, as well as a list of do’s and don’ts. On the more technical side, specifying a candidate for exams is now mandatory (even if it is generated for self evaluation). This change was implemented after many judges generated exams for themselves, even though they were intended for another person.

For our exam takers, we have also changed the description of the comments section in exams to help reflect better what we hope to learn in that area, to avoid suggestions  that are beyond the scope of the content creators (such as requests for changes to policy).

For candidates and judges who like to read cards in non-English languages, we are aware that with some of the new rules updates some card translations have become incorrect. To address this, a new system was set in place: whenever a card’s text changes, its translated versions are marked as unavailable. For each language, a translator for that language has to review the card’s text and correct it if needed, before marking the translation as available once more. To further help the people translating questions, we have added a new dashboard to the question editing page,to accurately show what components are still missing translation, or are under review.

We have also added a few features for the people working behind the scenes, to help them help all of you. We added a search function for exam writers to improve their quality of life while sifting through questions, and  an option for the people viewing exam statistics to separate rules from policy.

Lastly, we have made two technical changes to exams. First, we have fixed a bug when clicking on the “View All Exams” link on a user’s exam list. The last update we made caused a bug where clicking the link would return a “Page unavailable” error, which has been corrected (thanks Uncle Scott for noticing). And second, we have made a technical change to the way we represent answer IDs in exam webpages, to prevent any tech savvy individuals from trying to get an advantage by viewing the exam source code.

Quality of Life

Only a small update here. There seems to have been an issue with the avatar cropping tool that prevented it from working due to some compatibility issues with the system versions we use. This was fixed.

If you have any feedback, please send it to us so we can make JudgeApps better. If you have any problems, suggestions, or just some thoughts to share, please let us know about it.