Welcome to the May-June double creature feature from the Judge Apps blog! To begin, we finally made a large portion of the site accessible to the public. As of the 21st of May, multiple sections of the site are open to be viewed by the world. This includes the forums, regional pages, event pages, and projects.

This change has been in progress for the last few months. If you would like more information, you can find out about it in prior posts (here and here). As we explained in the past, we have made quite a few changes to the privacy settings users will have available to them, and we will talk a bit more about that this month as well.

Events

We decided, after some deliberation, to add a privacy filter for the staff of future events. What does that mean? Well, from now on, every judge will be able to decide if they wish for their name to be shown in event stuff lists available to everyone (this was the case prior to the change), or limit their name’s visibility. Judges can choose to restrict the visibility to registered users, or to only certified judges. This setting will also limit the event history list shown on a judge’s profile in a similar fashion.

This change will affect future events only, this means events whose date is after May fourth, and past events will remain unchanged. There are also a few exceptions to this new filter. Anyone who is on staff for an event will always be able to see the entire list of staff. Also, people with access to the event CSV files (like the tournament organizer) will be able to see the full list as well.

We hope this change will help limit the exposure for whoever wishes to do so.

User Accounts

As part of our continuous effort to make information on JudgeApps correct and representative of the “real world”, we disabled the ability for users to change their first and last name by editing their user profile. This change was made to prevent abuse now that the site is open to outside users. But fear not: If you would like to change your name, you can still do so by getting in touch with the account assistance team.

While solving issues is all well and good, new features are also important. We are working on a feature that allows users to see their work history with other judges, which should help you keep tabs on what events you did with others. 

Forums

There were a few updates this month with our forums system. First off, if you make a post, that post will become “frozen” and uneditable once that post has a reply. This was implemented to prevent any problems with posts at the top or middle of a thread, no longer matching replies that refer to them, and causing confusion. Such issues repeated themselves more often than we would like, and we hope that tweaking how editing works will resolve the issue.

Second, posts that in the past would have displayed their author’s location will now respect the user’s privacy settings.

And lastly, a change to disabled accounts. As you may know, accounts are occasionally disabled due to abuse, spam, or judge suspensions While the account is disabled, said user should not be able to post to the forums, but due to a bug, these users could still respond to posts via email . This has now been fixed. 

Quality of Life

We added a new filter option to lists (like exams and Exemplars). Now, it is possible to have a list show more (or less) results per page when searching for something. This update will also cause the removal of the duplicate advanced filter while searching exemplar lists.

An additional quality of life change we added is for exam questions writers. Now, when searching questions through the database, the search function will encompass the entire text of the question instead of a single field. This will help a more streamlined search instead of trying to find what you need one field at a time.

Other changes

We made a small change to the TLTP certification panel review. To protect the confidential and sensitive information of this panel, where in the past this review was accessible to whoever it was shared to, we have limited the availability of the review content to a few judges, like the L3 testing manager. If you share your reviews with someone, most judges will only see the relevant metadata (that is, that a review happened and its result), not its content. 

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That is all for this month’s update. We hope you found it useful and we will continue to inform you about new developments next month. If you have any other information you would like to share with us, we would love to hear your feedback.