Hey all! There are a couple things I wanted to give updates on today:

First off is content. Over the last week, we have loaded in the following L2 Courses, including their Videos, Text, and Quizzes:

• 100s Game Concepts I
• 100s Game Concepts II
• 200s Parts of a Card
• 300s Card Types
• 400s Zones
• 500s Turn Structure
• 600s I Spells, Abilities

There were some audio glitches and a few other bugs when we posted them to the site, and so over the last few days we have been working on fixing those. Thank you to all those who sent us feedback! At this point they should all be fixed and new versions have been uploaded to the site.

At the moment, all 10 questions are visible each time you take the quizzes, and there are no cool downs on modules where you have failed the accompanying quiz. When the entire process is uploaded and ready to go, we will be adding a 1-day cooldown to each quiz.

While we are still receiving lots of feedback and tweaking things, we felt a cooldown could be counterproductive. Just to be clear, anyone who completes the modules before the cooldown is put in place will not have to retake anything they have already passed. This is not intended to announce “go push through them before the cooldowns are put in place” but an explanation of why someone engaging with the content as it is put onto the website in stages might have a slightly different experience than new L2 candidates or those L1s working towards the Advanced Comprehensive Rules Badge in the future.

As we continue to populate the site, if you have any feedback or questions, you can submit that us using the Contact Us form.

Next, this is a quick reminder to everyone that ALL in-person conferences have been cancelled/postponed through August. After contacting organizers and cancelling conferences due to Covid-19 March, in May we opened up applications for Digital Conferences ONLY for June-August.

We understand that some areas around the globe have started to lift restrictions and recommendations around gatherings and you all are eager to get together in you community as soon as possible, based on what is reasonable and safe in your area. In August, we will begin looking back on the data that we have around Digital Conferences, and taking a look at the policies we have in place around in-person events, support for digital events, restrictions on attendees, whether different areas, countries, Regions, etc should have different rules or regulations around events, and what those lines should be. At that point we will make a decision about those policies for the September-December period.

However, until that point, as we have mentioned previously, we cannot support and/or incentivize judges gathering in-person for conferences. Just to be clear, any conference gathering in-person instead of digitally as required, cannot receive any promo support from Judge Academy. If you believe the Organizer of your conference has somehow received an exception, they have not. Please don’t do it. There is a lot of trust that is going into allowing Digital Conferences at all (this, trusting attendees to be engaged, organizers to distribute, etc). Please don’t ruin it for everyone.

Okay, with that, one last thing. Our event system updates went live, and with it, the ability to control what events you want to be notified about, including event type and location. You can set these and other notifications on the “Notifications” Tab of your new, fancy profile! That said, those of you who were set to receive notifications for new events in the USA-East region may have noticed that a very helpful and well-meaning Lawyer misunderstood what a “Judge” was (definitely not the first time it’s happened to me), and created an account to post an event. They quickly realized the error and deleted their account on their own soon after. That said, it was an event created in that region, and therefore if you were set to be notified for new events, you were. In order to prevent this from happening again, and to stop any concern of spam, we’ve made it so that you need to be at least a Rules Advisor in order to create events using the Event Portal. That said, there are TONS of local and large Tournament Organizers who are not RAs or Judges, which is why it was open to all community members previously. To account for this, we’ve also created a few permission sets on the back end that don’t come with a certification. If you are a TO with an account who is not an Rules Advisor or Judge Academy Certified Judge, please let us know and we will get your account the needed permissions to continue creating events.

That’s all for this week. We’ll be uploading more modules and will give you another recap of what’s live next week!