{"id":725,"date":"2018-10-15T12:00:39","date_gmt":"2018-10-15T12:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/judgeapps\/?p=725"},"modified":"2019-05-05T12:13:04","modified_gmt":"2019-05-05T19:13:04","slug":"judgeapps-updates-september-2018","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/judgeapps\/2018\/10\/15\/judgeapps-updates-september-2018\/","title":{"rendered":"JudgeApps Updates – September 2018"},"content":{"rendered":"

This month saw a lot of bug fixes and user experience improvements. We see people starting to use the <\/span>Discourse discussion forum<\/span><\/a>, and we encourage you to give it a try.<\/span><\/p>\n

IMPORTANT: If you find any security bugs, DO NOT post them to the Discourse forum!<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Emails<\/span><\/h1>\n

During September we dedicated efforts into making JudgeApps email services better. The main change was to change our email services to Amazon\u2019s Simple Email Service (SES). After receiving several assistance requests from users who didn\u2019t get their account verification emails, we realized that iCloud (Apple\u2019s cloud and email service) was blocking emails sent by JudgeApps, because their source (JudgeApps using an email service controlled by us) was classified as untrusted. Once we identified the issue and started using SES, our emails (now using a well-known service) were blocked no more.<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the unintended side effect of this change was that for a few days emails were not sent immediately. We fixed that as well, and now email should be going out as expected. We\u2019re sorry for any inconvenience this might have caused.<\/span><\/p>\n

We also fixed two small bugs that affected email notifications for new event applications. The first bug caused emails for event applications to be sent with a broken link to the event page. The link was missing the domain part (links were missing this part: <\/span>apps.magicjudges.org<\/span><\/a>), so it couldn\u2019t be clicked. The second bug was caused by a wrong variable assignment that set the judge name to be the same as the event name, so the message would claim that the event applied to itself whenever a new application notification was sent (Thanks Nate Hurley<\/a><\/span><\/span>, for letting us know). Both were fixed. Event admins rejoice!<\/span><\/p>\n

Translated Exam Questions<\/span><\/h1>\n

Two issues affecting translated content for exams were taken care of, one affecting users and the other affected the people translating questions.<\/span><\/p>\n

First, we improved the user experience by changing the way questions are loaded. Whenever a question is loaded, all its translations are loaded as well, but only the ones using the user\u2019s default language are shown (or English, if the question hasn\u2019t been translated to that language yet). Up until recently, all the content was loaded and shown on screen, and once the page was fully loaded, all the irrelevant translations were hidden. This caused two possible unexpected behaviors:<\/span><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. If it wasn\u2019t quick enough, users would see all the text before it disappeared, and it was confusing<\/span><\/li>\n
  2. If one of the content maintainers started editing a question and then clicked the browser\u2019s \u2018back\u2019 button, all the text of all the languages would appear (and wouldn\u2019t disappear)<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    To prevent this awkward behavior, all text not in the user\u2019s default language (or English fallback) is now set to be hidden as soon as it\u2019s added to the page (think of it like a replacement effect that reads \u201cthis translation enters the page hidden\u201d).<\/span><\/p>\n

    The other issue was a bag on the tests\u2019 admin pages. Each test admin page has a table with all the questions, and for each of those questions, the translation status for each language. Clicking the link for the status should take you to the question translation page, but that link was missing the question ID, thus sending translators to a nonexistent page. Thanks Christian Genz<\/a><\/span><\/span> for noticing the behavior, identifying the problem and telling us about it!<\/span><\/p>\n

    Minor Bug Fixes<\/span><\/h1>\n

    The following bugs were found and squashed:<\/span><\/p>\n