Hello everyone and welcome to this month’s edition of what is new in JudgeApps land. This month we have a new review type and an update to our text editor. Caching was added to a few more sections of JudgeApps, as well as a bunch of performance upgrades to the site.

Events

We start with a new upgrade to general posting in JudgeApps. For that we upgraded the TinyMCE, the text editor used throughout the site to post. This upgraded version will provide a better user experience when users are creating or editing events, as well as when editing project descriptions and the “about me” section of their profile. We expanded the text editor window to give you more space to work with and less issues relating to text and images not showing at the right places when posting.

Also on the note of events forums, there was seemly an error regarding access to said forums. While event participants like judges and staff had no issues, individuals who were supposed to be able to see said forums due to positions within the program, like RCs, didn’t seem to be able to view the new “miscellaneous” forum in some cases. This happened since the official forum properly gave those users access,but the miscellaneous event forum didn’t. This is now sorted and shouldn’t be a problem in the future.

We also noticed that in some cases files uploaded to event pages are given the wrong file name. When “replacing” one file with another, the new file would be saved using the old file’s name, including the extension. This code was changed to prevent this from occurring and now all files should appear with the name the file had when uploaded.

User Accounts

Remember the TinyMCE from last section? That gave us the added advantage that now we can also have the “about me” section of the user profile larger and more comfortable to use. This section should now be fitted to the size of the screen.

Performance Upgrades

We added a few more caching functions to the site. This should help in a few areas, including site loading time. Since some portions of the site don’t necessarily change whenever a user loads a new page, caching will use the existing data available to it instead of requesting all the data from JudgeApps again without reason.

In some cases, this new cache caused the number of notifications shown to users to appear incorrectly. This was fixed. Another issue was that forum posts were cached without taking time zones into consideration, causing some posts to be shown out-of-order. This was fixed as well.

For forum posts search we also refined the search process for them in order to reduce the search time that might be required to find a specific users recent forum posts and improved the way recent forum posts are presented.

For specific user posts, up to this point the site would search all forum posts taking into account a lot of irrelevant posts, from closed forums for example, an action that would increase the search time for no reason. This has now improved and shouldn’t take as long to resolve.

As for recent forum posts, the relevant query was also updated and should be less resource consuming in the future. We also made upgrades to the judge search function making it less resource consuming and more efficient for searches that include multiple variables.

Reviews

We added a new review type to the site – the GP Head Judge review for Team Leads. This mandatory review submitted by a GPHJ for each of their Team Leads has now received its own type of review, allowing us to ensure that the GPHJ Lead has the ability to see all of those reviews, and allowing us to track those reviews for the GPHJ Renewal process.

A different issue in the field of reviews was that very rarely, while editing reviews, a hidden field would be submitted blank instead of containing the needed information, causing a  server error. We still don’t know why this was happening, but we’ve added a safety check to the code that handles review edits, and if this field is missing, we use our best guess of its information instead of just returning the error.

Other Updates

• Yo dog! I heard you like headers so we added headers to your headers so you can have more headers while using headers. In short H5 and H6 tags are now usable in JudgeApps.
• Some people have permissions to download data from the site (such as list of judges or Exemplar). Whenever that data was being updated, a warning would show up, letting people know that the current version of the data is out-of-date. That warning was accidentally shown to all users, but it was fixed so only people with access to that data can see it.

That is all for this month. We hope this month’s blog has given you some insights to the inner working of the site and maybe provided you with new tools to work with in the future. Please remember that we are here for you and if you have any issues or feedback please feel free to get in touch with us about it.