Welcome to the January JudgeApps update. We have been keeping busy. This month we have a lot of small changes in multiple areas, as well as a long list of improvements for exams. So, let’s get going.
Reviews
For exams, L3 advancement reviews now have a longer time gap before they are locked for editing. This change is introduced to help L3 panels, who can now advance a judge to the new rank of L3 without worrying about the need to write a complete review on the spot.
Exams
More exam issues showed up this month for exam types that were taken more than ten times. When trying to look at the statistics for that exam type, an error would occur. One of the stats tables that shows the history of exams taken was set to show ten entries, and when the eleventh entry was inserted to the table, it would fail and send the user trying to watch the statistics to an error page. The number of items is now limited to up-to-ten instead of “all”.
In addition, we changed who can access an exam once it was created. While for the exam taker the test might be timed, for the creator of the exam (assuming they are not the same person) it isn’t. This created a situation where a test creator can show the questions to a candidate, allowing them to take the exam without time restrictions. To prevent this, we have limited access to the questions themselves to the candidate alone until the exam is completed.
Now, let us talk about Jace, Architect of Thought. While not as cool as Jace, the Mind Sculptor he does have one thing going for him. He has the longest text box in the game! What does it mean? Well, if used as a card in a printed exam question, he would warp the page in some cases. We made sure his superpowers won’t affect us in exams from now on.
Lastly, we had a couple of technical issues with the exams. First printing of answer key sheets in Firefox seemed to create some interesting results. This was fixed to be less interesting and more functional, as intended. Second, we have automated the deletion of unfinished exams after a sufficient time has passed. Users will be informed and if no action is taken, the exam will be deleted.
Also for content creators, it seems like editing existing questions also caused an error if someone attempted to add them to an exam type they shouldn’t be allowed to add questions to. This was fixed and should not create future issues.
Text Editor
A while back, we spoke about the new text editor we integrated into JudgeApps (you might have seen it when creating a new event or project, for example). This still caused a few growing pains as a technical error made specific form fields in some places to appear in the wrong language, unless you where the lucky first to see it after a server restart. We made sure this would not persist by forcing the site to recheck the relevant fields every time they are created.
Level Maintenance
Other things we talked about a while back was the level maintenance emails judges should be getting at the end of the year if they haven’t filed out the required information. We have now made sure phase one emails have been templated, so it can be translated with Rosetta.
Also on the issue of maintenance, judges that received this email will find within it a link to the “Contact a Regional Coordinator page” instead of the filtered list of relevant judges. This should reduce the amount of leg work required and organize everything needed into a nice condensed form.
Checklists
Keeping with Simic themes with the release of Ravnica Allegiance, checklists can now be cloned if rejected (Muhahaha!). This means users with rejected lists can now use them to create a copy instead of rewriting them. This should reduce some of the work required for using them and make life a little bit easier for everyone.
Notifications
Judges that have been getting forum notifications can now enjoy a new feature. Instead of having all notifications show on the same page, users can now choose to have them divided by forum in their notifications settings. This makes life better for those who try to keep up with the happenings on the forums instead of the big pile of notifications we had up to this point.
Forums
In more forums related news, forum mods can now mark a specific post as the correct answer to a forum topic. This will cause the tagged post to be shown right below the first post and will add special styling to it in order to make sure it isn’t missed. This should make info hunting on the forums for specific answers easier.
Bugs
Some of you might have encountered issues while trying to save reviews and continue editing, resulting in some errors. This is now fixed.
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This is all for January. We hope you enjoyed our work and writing. We’ll be signing of with a happy new lunar year and of course, if you have any feedback you can always leave it here for us.