Hey all, there’s a ton of updates this week! So here’s a rundown of what we’ll cover before we dive in:

• Patch Notes
• Global Go-Live
• Translations
• Sponsorships
• L3 Emeritus

So let’s start!

Patch Notes

We sent out a ton of fixes over the last week, and Chris made a fancy Patch Notes for you all:

Judge Academy Patch Notes for October 29^th, 2019

The following changes or improvements have been made to the Judge Academy website:

1. The forums, user profiles, and user search have been restricted to be viewable only when logged in
2. The URL for a specific user profile has been changed to use the Display Name provided during account creation, not an incremented ID number
3. For clarity, the ‘Payment Information’ tab in the user profile section will only be visible when a purchase has been made
4. Additional account Privacy Tools have been implemented when logged in at: judgeacademy.com/privacy-tools
5. Additional security requirements have been enforced for search terms when using the user search
6. Added the features to enable Level 3 Emeritus subscriptions
7. Added the functionality for a user to sponsor another judge (if you are interested in more information please submit a ticket using the ‘Contact Us’ page)
8. Checkboxes were added to the address options during checkout to simplify using the same billing and shipping addresses
9. The storage of a phone number has been changed to an optional field during checkout and is also editable in your user profile
10. The feedback form now auto-populates with user information to simplify filling out the form
11. Various UI, payment, and profile bugs have been corrected, including a temporary bug to Endorsements that was caused by the patch and has since been fixed

Global Go-Live

As we announced on October 1st, our Target Date for a Global Go-Live was January 1. Based on our research, we are going to get VERY close. We will turn on Globally on January 6th. This is for a few reasons. As most of you know, January 1st is a National Holiday in the US, and celebrated in many countries around the world. We use an out-of-office development team that will be unavailable due to the Holiday. Any issues with development, many payment issues, or other outside forces would be unlikely to be able to be accomplished until after the weekend, even if our team were in-office. Therefore, we are pushing our go-live date to Monday January 6th, in order to give everyone the best experience possible.

Translations

Part of going Global is acknowledging that we are a large and diverse community. A community where many judges to not speak English, and interact with Magic and their MTG/Judge communities primarily in another language. We are now ready to begin our localization efforts. We will start by translating the site, module scripts, and exam questions into Japanese, French, Italian, German, and Spanish. While this doesn’t cover every language, we hope that it covers most of the primary languages that judges use to interact with Magic. Once we have done those, and launched globally, and have a better idea of numbers, we will be looking at what other languages we may need to translate into to support (looking at you, Portuguese!) and will have subsequent call-outs as we go.

For now, we are looking for Judges who are fluent enough with English and one of the languages above to help us with the translations. Our Scripts are approximately 2000-3000 words each, and we are paying $100 USD per script/for each language.

In the next few days, we’ll add it to the Get Involved Tab on the website with this same info, but for now, if you are interested in helping to translate learning materials for your fellow community members, please email us a Questions@JudgeAcademy.com

Sponsorships

As we mentioned, we allow one user to pay for and sponsor a judges membership. If you are looking to sponsor one or more judges, please submit a service ticket, as you will need special permissions on your account to do so for now.

L3 Emeritus

We have finished all development for L3 Emeritus, and those who have purchased their membership should have it marked on their profile. If you are looking at coming back to the Judge Community, please read our previous blog, here!