Messaging festival staff

Messages, the first tab of your inbox at /judge/inbox/messages, is where you write to the people who run the festivals you judge for — a broken screener you want to explain, a deadline question, anything that needs a person.

One thing to hold onto before the details: this is a two-way conversation. Festival staff have a screen of their own — an Inbox at their organization — where your message lands, and their reply comes back into this conversation, with an amber count on its row. They are emailed your words as well, so somebody who is not in FilmScorecard that week still reads them.

Who you can write to

Press New, above the conversation list, and search the people on offer. Each row is a name over a line like "Coordinator, Pine City Film Festival" — their role and the festival(s) you share.

The list is the festivals' staff, matched to your seasons and to the calls you have applied to:

• Anyone the organization has given staff access covering a festival or season you sit on — coordinators, festival admins, programmers, viewers alike.
• The staff of a call you have an open application to. From the moment you apply, the people covering that season are on your list — including at an organization you have never worked for. You do not have to be accepted first to ask a question about the call.
• Finished seasons count. You can still write to the staff of a season you judged after it closes — payment and follow-up questions are real.
• Somebody who wrote to you first, even when they cover nothing of yours — an organization's owner or administrator, say. They join the list once their conversation exists, so you can always answer; there is no way to reach them before they write.

Who is never on it:

• Other judges. Judges cannot message each other, anywhere, in any direction. The picker's own footer says so.
• You.
• People at the organization who have no staff access to any festival or season of yours, and staff whose access has been suspended or removed.
• The staff of an organization whose invitation you never accepted, unless you have an open application to one of their calls. Accepting an invitation is what attaches your account to a festival's records; until then, an application is the other way in. See Your invitations and Applying to an open call.
• The staff of a festival that is unavailable on FilmScorecard, for as long as it is. See When a festival is unavailable.

An application is a temporary door, and a decision closes it. While your application is New, Shortlisted or Countered on the festival's side it reads as Applied to you, and the staff of that call are on this list. Once the festival decides it, the list goes back to being about the seasons you sit on — the conversation stays readable either way. If they took you on, they also sent you an invitation, and it is accepting that invitation that keeps the line open.

Starting a conversation

1. Press New and pick a person. If you already have a conversation with them it opens; nothing is ever duplicated.
2. A new pairing opens an empty pane — "No messages yet. Write to Nadia Brandt if something needs resolving." Nothing exists yet; the conversation is created the moment your first message sends.
3. Type in the box at the bottom and press Send — or ⌘ Enter (Ctrl Enter on Windows). Plain Enter stays a line break, so a longer message never sends before you mean it to. Up to 2000 characters; plain text only.

Your message appears on the right-hand side of the stream, in indigo, with its time underneath. Times here are in universal time (UTC), not your local time zone. Sent something wrong? See Editing and deleting your messages.

What the staff member receives is the message on their own Inbox screen straight away — if they have your conversation open, it appears there within about 10 seconds — and an email within the hour with the subject "A message from your name". The email names you, says which festival you judge for, carries your message word for word, and links them back to the conversation so they can answer in it. Their answer arrives here, not in your email.

One conversation per person, per organization. A coordinator who works across two festivals of the same organization is one conversation, and the line under their name lists both festivals. The same human at two unrelated organizations is two separate conversations.

It keeps itself up to date

A reply arrives while you watch. While the browser tab is in front of you:

• The conversation you have open is re-read about every 10 seconds, so a staff member's reply appears in it within about 10 seconds, with no reload.
• The conversation list is re-read about every 30 seconds, so a new message moves its conversation to the top and puts an amber count on it within about half a minute.
• The amber number on the Inbox row, and the counts on the three tabs, are re-read about every 30 seconds on every judging screen, not only the Inbox.

Nothing is read while the tab is behind something else. Come back to it and everything is read again at once. Anything you do yourself — sending, editing, deleting, archiving, opening a conversation — shows straight away rather than waiting for the next read.

Choosing a conversation does not redraw the screen. The row you press lights up at once, the list stays exactly where it was, and only the conversation side shows its placeholder while the messages arrive. The address changes to that conversation's, so the back button and a copied link both work as before — and so does the link in an email telling you somebody wrote.

If a read fails, it is tried again a few times before anything is said:

Editing and deleting your messages

Point at a message of yours and three dots appear beside it (on a phone they are always visible). The menu holds two items, and both work only on messages you sent — the gray system record lines are the record and take no changes from anyone, and neither do the staff member's own messages.

Edit message turns the bubble into a box in place, with Save and Cancel. ⌘ Enter saves, Esc cancels, and Save will not commit while the box is empty. An edited message shows a quiet Edited mark beside its time — the mark is set by the system the moment the words change, and there is no way to edit without it.

Delete message confirms first, quoting the message so you delete the right one. It leaves the conversation from the moment you confirm and cannot be restored — there is no undo and no "deleted message" placeholder; it is simply gone from the stream, and the conversation's last-activity date steps back to the newest message still standing.

Two honest limits, both about what has already left the screen:

• The email may already be out, and the message may already have been read on the staff member's own screen. An edit does not chase either. Deleting before the email goes out does stop the email.
• A report still carries everything. If a conversation is reported, the copy that goes to FilmScorecard support includes deleted messages, marked as deleted, and notes which messages were edited after sending. Deleting is not a way to take something out of the record.

The conversation list

One row per conversation: initials, name, role and festival, the date of the last message, a preview line ("You: …" when the last word was yours), and an amber count when anything in it is unread. Opening a conversation clears its unread, and those counts are what feed the Messages tab pill — and one of the three terms behind the amber badge on the Inbox nav row, alongside unread inbox items and invitations you have not answered.

A dropdown above the list switches between Conversations and Archived, and the search box matches names, roles and festivals.

What counts as unread is anything in a conversation that you did not write — a staff member's message, and the quiet grey record lines — that has arrived since you last opened it. Your own messages never count, and archived conversations are outside the numbers until something new arrives in them.

The conversation menu

The three dots at the top of an open conversation:

Block and Report are yours alone. The staff member's own menu holds Archive and nothing else — they cannot block you, and they have nowhere to report you.

Archiving, and coming back

Archive this conversation hides it from the default list. It stays fully readable — switch the dropdown to Archived — and the menu there offers Move back to conversations.

A new message revives it by itself. Any message — a staff member's reply, or your own next message into it — returns an archived conversation to the active list. You never lose a live conversation to an old archive decision.

Your archive is your own. The staff member may have filed the same conversation on their side, or not; neither of you is told, and neither affects the other. A new message from either of you brings it back for both.

Archiving does not mark anything read: an archived conversation holding unread messages keeps them — but they leave the amber counts while it is archived. The counts follow your active list. A new message returns the conversation to the active list, and its unread count with it.

Blocking someone

Block confirms first, and the dialog says exactly what it does:

Nadia Brandt cannot write to you from the moment you confirm, and you cannot write to them. Assignments, announcements and the rest of Pine City Film Festival staff are unaffected.

Once blocked:

• The message box is replaced by a quiet strip — "You blocked Nadia Brandt" — with a line pointing at Unblock in the menu.
• The conversation's row carries a quiet Blocked pill.
• Nothing else changes. Your films, your queue, the festival's announcements and every other staff member are untouched. Blocking is about this one person's line to you, nothing more.
• Nobody is notified. No email and no alert goes to the person you blocked. They find out only if they try to write, at which point their message box says you are not accepting messages from them — the plain fact, with no reason and no way to ask you for one.

Unblock, in the same menu, reverses it after its own confirmation. The conversation and its history are unchanged either way.

Blocking one person is not blocking the festival. Blocking a festival stops it inviting you to judge at all, and lives in two other places: the Blocked festivals card on your account's Directory listing tab, and the ⋯ menu on an invitation. Neither touches this conversation, and this block does not stop invitations. See Blocking a festival from an invitation.

Reporting a conversation

Report this conversation opens a dialog that states where a report goes:

The report goes to FilmScorecard support with a copy of this thread. Pine City Film Festival staff are not told who reported them, and your assignments are untouched while it is looked at.

Say what is wrong in the box — it is required, up to 2000 characters — and press Send report. The button will not commit while the box is empty.

What happens then:

• The report goes to FilmScorecard — the platform — never to the festival. Nobody at the organization can read it, and the staff member is not told who reported them.
• A copy of the conversation travels with your words, so support reads what you read.
• The dialog closing is the whole confirmation. No banner, no status, and no list anywhere of reports you have sent. FilmScorecard support follows up with you directly if they need more.

You can report a conversation you have blocked, and one whose staff member has since left — the history is what is being reported.

When a staff member leaves

When the person's staff access at the organization ends, the message box in your conversation becomes a quiet strip:

No longer staff at Pine City Film Festival

The conversation stays readable. Their replacement will start a fresh thread.

Everything already said stays readable; nothing new can be sent — a send that slips through is refused with "This person is no longer festival staff, so new messages cannot be sent." They also leave the New list. Whoever replaces them appears there as themselves, and your conversation with the replacement starts from nothing.

Nobody inherits the conversation. Staff at a festival cannot read each other's messages, so there is no colleague who can pick up where the last one left off — which is why a replacement starts a new thread rather than answering in the old one.

The same strip appears on every conversation with a festival that is unavailable on FilmScorecard, and there it does not mean anybody left. Nothing can be sent in either direction while the festival is unavailable; once it is available again the strip goes, and the message box is back in the same conversation. See When a festival is unavailable.

On a phone

Under a narrow width the two panes become two steps: the conversation list fills the screen, and opening a row takes the conversation full screen, with a back arrow in its header and the message box pinned to the bottom.

If something is refused

Everything you typed stays where it is; nothing sends silently.

What this screen does not have

• No sound and no pop-up. A reply shows itself by arriving in the list and the conversation — see It keeps itself up to date — and nothing is read while the browser tab is in the background.
• No attachments, no formatting. Plain text.
• No edit history. An edited message shows its latest words and an Edited mark — not what it said before.
• No read receipts. Nobody is shown whether you have read anything, and you are not shown whether the staff member has read yours — in either direction, on either screen.
• No group conversations, and no writing to "the festival". Every conversation is you and one person, and nobody else at that organization can read it — not their colleagues, not their boss.
• No messaging other judges — not a missing feature but a rule of blind judging.
• Nothing about the person beyond their name, role and festivals. The picker classifies them and stops there.
• A long conversation shows its latest 500 messages, with a note at the top saying how many exist in all.

Related guides

• Your inbox — the Alerts tab: announcements, notices, read and unread, archiving.
• Your invitations — the Invitations tab: every offer a festival has made you, and the three answers to it.
• Applying to an open call — the other way a festival's staff arrive on your list.
• Screener problems your judges raise — for coordinators: what a judge's report looks like on your side, and the send-back that answers it.
• Messaging your judges — the same conversation from the festival's side, if you also help run one.
• Your account — the Notifications tab, including the Email switch that decides whether a staff member's message reaches your email.