Like for most, December is the holiday season, and the JudgeApps development team took some time off as well, which led to a quiet month with very few changes happening. If you’re starting to think that this is the end of the post, worry not. While December saw very few changes, one of them is the result of a feature that was in the making for months.
Forums
Last month we removed some code we maintained ourselves in favor of a standard module. Usually it’s considered a good practice because standard modules get updated with bug and security fixes, which we could miss if we use a copy of the same code and maintain it ourselves. Our tests showed that both behave the same, so we proceeded with the change. Apparently we missed some subtle changes, which broke two features in the forums:
- Quoting posts was broken and is now fixed
- Post preview is broken, but we know about it and working to fix it
We would like to thank all the people who noticed and let us know.
Practice Exams
The rules and policy practice exams got a small, but very significant, change. Exams have several purposes — certification, self evaluation, level maintenance and mentoring — which are available to JudgeApps users. To enhance a mentor’s toolkit, a decision was made to allow L2+ judges to proctor rules and policy practice exams to other judges. If you’re mentoring a candidate and want to assess their knowledge level or track their progress, you can now use practice exams to do so. Many thanks to Uri for his suggestion.
IRC Channels
The last thing we’ll talk about before our big reveal are the IRC Channels we use for chat.magicjudges.org. After several outages and service downtime, we’ve reached the point where the chat went offline, and wouldn’t go back online. Since past experience shows that recovering from this could take a very long time, we decided to move to a new IRC network. If you would like to know more about it, Dan Collins wrote an article with all the details.
Checklists
Just like reviews and exams before them, checklists are a feature that’s been in development for a long time, and after being tested by L3s for a while now, we’ve made it available to a wider audience by allowing access to all L2 judges. So what are checklists all about?
In the judge program, we have some processes that require a judge to meet a set of requirements. As more and more of those requirements are now available through JudgeApps (exams, reviews, events), it’s only logical to track them on JudgeApps as well. Instead of writing emails with review numbers, exam IDs or event links, checklists have a comprehensive list of all the requirements for a specific role/request, and allow the judge filling it to link directly to the relevant resources. When applicable, checklists collect the requirements for you, so if, for example, you need a review of another judge written by you, the checklist will let you choose one from the reviews you submitted through JudgeApps.
Currently we support two checklists: Level 3 Self-Review Approval Request and Level 3 Application; but we already have plans for other checklists to support.
We hope that you enjoy your JudgeApps experience. If you have any ideas you would like to see on JudgeApps in 2019, or find something that requires fixing, we’d be happy to hear from you.