Improved Event Links on Social Media

Have you ever seen a Facebook post like this?

Old Facebook Link

Those words “Log In” sure are annoying, aren’t they? Wouldn’t it be nicer if Facebook just showed you the actual name of that cool event you want to apply to?

Now it does!

New Facebook Link

Many thanks to JudgeApps team member Jernej Lipovec for figuring out an elegant way to implement this improvement. I’d also like to give a shout out to Lems and John Kmiecik for both suggesting the enhancement. (If you have a feature request, please let us know!)

One big takeaway: make sure you teach your local judges and Tournament Organizers to use informative titles! The picture above is a good example of what not to name your event. Something like “Preliminary Pro Tour Qualifier – Sydney 2016 – Nymeria Comics” is much more descriptive!

Interested in the technical details of this change? Well, before today, JudgeApps required you to log in before it would cough up any information about events. Since Facebook doesn’t have a JudgeApps login, links on Facebook would always get bounced out to the Log In page.

But now, thanks to Jernej’s fix, JudgeApps will reveal the title of an event even if you’re not logged in, which allows Facebook to use this information accordingly. Hooray!

Note that the event title will be shown if and only if the event has been published. So you don’t have to worry about this change “leaking” information about events that haven’t been published yet!

Sadly, links previously published on Facebook have been cached, so their titles can’t be changed. But links for all events going forward should look great!