{"id":729,"date":"2018-11-15T12:00:52","date_gmt":"2018-11-15T12:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/judgeapps\/?p=729"},"modified":"2019-05-05T12:13:04","modified_gmt":"2019-05-05T19:13:04","slug":"judgeapps-updates-october-2018","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/judgeapps\/2018\/11\/15\/judgeapps-updates-october-2018\/","title":{"rendered":"JudgeApps Updates – October 2018"},"content":{"rendered":"

This month we revamped the forum notification system, made visual changes for event pages on smartphones and tackled other minor issues. You\u2019re here, and we assume those interest you, so without further ado…<\/span><\/p>\n

Forum Notifications<\/span><\/h1>\n

In the passing month, forums received some updates. First, we sped up forum notifications. This was done by improving the way JudgeApps finds out who should receive said notifications, which is one of the most time-consuming parts of the notification system (some forum posts used to tie up the notification process for almost 10 minutes!). Next, we improved it some more by reducing the amount of notifications settings checked before deciding whether to send a notification to a specific user. With all the events and projects using the forums to notify a lot of people about a lot of stuff, we hope these improvements will have a positive effect on all JudgeApps users.<\/span><\/p>\n

Did we mention notification settings? Well, we made some changes to how these are configured as well. The changes will affect new JudgeApps users as well as existing ones who get access to new forums. Previously, the default setting for \u201cNew Generic Forum Post\u201d was to not send notifications to users. This default was good for most cases, since most users don\u2019t want to get notified for each post in every forum, there are some special cases for which the default isn\u2019t a good fit. The most obvious exceptions to the rule are the Official and Un-official Announcements forums. Silencing those by default caused a lot of judges to miss important information. Another exception are some special forums created for sub-groups of people (e.g. L2+ judges of a region). A user wouldn\u2019t get notifications for posts in such forums unless they change the forum\u2019s notification settings, but knowing that such a forum exists without being notified about it was\u2026 impractical.<\/span><\/p>\n

A primer on how the settings work: You have three categories of notification settings: Global, Forum, and Topic. The Global settings can be edited at <\/span>https:\/\/apps.magicjudges.org\/notifications\/settings<\/span><\/a>, and the Forum and Topic settings can be edited on the page for each individual topic. The most specific setting that exists, applies. If you haven\u2019t chosen a special setting for a Topic, we check the Forum. If that also doesn\u2019t have a special setting, we use your Global setting. <\/span><\/p>\n

New users now have a Global default to get email notifications for new generic forum posts, and public forums have a Forum setting of off (except for the two forums mentioned above, which default to on). As part of the initial account setup, the user is prompted to review the default. That said, most of you are probably existing users who wonder how the change affects you, so please read on\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

Existing users whose Global default did not include email notifications had that Global setting changed to enable email notifications. However, we first transferred your current setting to each public Forum that you currently have access to. The difference is that now all the public forums that were silenced by default, are now specifically silenced on a forum-by-forum basis. You won\u2019t see any notifications you weren\u2019t getting before, but if you are now added to a new forum, you will start getting notifications by default. <\/span><\/p>\n

Unfortunately, this doesn\u2019t help the existing users who are unaware of the fact that they aren\u2019t receiving official announcements, or that there are some new forums that they have access to. Accordingly, we encourage you to check your <\/span>notification settings<\/span><\/a>, as well as going through the <\/span>list of forums you have access to<\/span><\/a> to make sure you\u2019re getting all the notifications that interest you.<\/span><\/p>\n

Events<\/span><\/h1>\n

We fixed a bug that caused some confusion among unexpecting users. When working with events, the list of countries for the event location would sometimes display the countries\u2019 names in an unexpected language (we got reports about Spanish and French). Apparently, the language would be set according to the first user interacting with that specific instance of our web server, and then would never update when other users (with different language settings) access it. We made sure the list of names is updated every time the event form is created, so now the list will match the language of the current user.<\/span><\/p>\n

In other event news, we changed the display settings for images in event pages to scale down when the screen is smaller than the image. When viewing an event on a big screen this wasn\u2019t really an issue, but when used on a phone, viewing an event was a nightmare when big images were involved.<\/span><\/p>\n

Other<\/span><\/h1>\n

Like every other month, this month saw some small changes and fixes:<\/span><\/p>\n