News Bulletin: June 2023
June 7, 2023
As Road to Nationals season comes to a close, all eyes are on The Calling Singapore for the reveal of what other cards are inside the Judge Reward Packs and a potential Dusk Till Dawn spoiler. In the meantime, though, we’d like to take the time to catch you up on some updates and news you may have missed, as well as highlight a variety of judge and rules-related community content for you to check out!
In case you missed it, the Judge Conferences page is online! Scroll to the top of the page or click here to get brought to the page. Information about what Judge Conferences are, as well as ways the Flesh & Blood Judge Program can help support different types of conferences is located here. Depending on the type of conference, presenters and/or attendees may be eligible for Judge Reward Packs – as a thank-you for contributing their time and effort to making the Judge Program the best it can be!
Interested organizers are able to apply via this link.
2023 support will begin starting from July 2023. Please apply until May 31st if you would like to run a conference in July 2023. Please be aware that there will be only a very limited amount of conferences supported during the first trimester.
The Technology team would like to announce that there have been a few minor updates to JudgeHub & the JudgeHub bot, mostly related to events:
- Users applying to an event will now be prompted to enter their shirt size as part of their application, instead of being told to go to their profile to do so, to reduce the number of applications submitted with that field empty.
- Event organizers will now find a hyperlink on their event’s page that they can copy and use in Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets to “import” their Applications CSV. This link returns the same information as the Applications CSV download they already have access to, but the authentication is in the URL instead of through being logged in to the website, allowing the data to be imported “live” to whatever other spreadsheet-based workflow they may use. (“Live” is based on your spreadsheet app’s configuration, Google says they update
=IMPORTDATA("")formulas every hour.) - The JudgeHub bot will now respond to the /card command in all servers it has been invited to.
- A few minor fixes were issued, relating to: a formatting issue related to the timer overlay box on exams, an incorrect link to delete your application to an event from the edit screen, an upstream issue with how Judge Articles are announced to Discord, and updated some dependencies to the latest versions.
This month, we saw a lot of judge-related content in and around the web! We’d like to highlight a few of them below:
First off, we’d like to give a shoutout to the IP2 Podcast, run by the dynamic duo of Felix Chung and Shea Ashbee from Calgary! Felix and Shea are avid judges and players who have been creating content on the channel since April. They have covered a variety of topics relating to judging and community management, and have a number of great interviews with prominent judges in the community – check them out!
In addition to their Youtube channel, you can find them on their Twitter and Mastodon pages. Give them a follow!
Speaking of Youtube content, we also have a few videos to note from the last month!
- Block Out Party, which has been mentioned in some of our previous Community Spotlights, have published another rules-related video, this time focusing on one of the more infamous cards that cause rules headaches: Exude Confidence!
- In case you missed it, The Living Legends Podcast had Rules & Policy Manager Joshua Scott as a guest for an extended interview! In it, he covers a large breadth of topics: favorite rules interactions, some news about the future of the program, and his personal origin story!