[gold stinger]

A few notable changes will be coming to batch this year. Not all of it will take place immediately, but some of it will be noticable immediately. This small write-up will go over all of the changes happening:

Starting immediately, 'Light Accept' will be known as 'Change Recommended', and 'Conditional Queue' will be known as 'Fixes Required'. This is being done to disambiguate Light Accept and Conditional Queue for newer stepartists, and also make it clear & concise what sort of action either status entails, since not everyone may know what a Light Accept could mean for their song unless they've been up-to-date on the past year of changes in batch.

Also starting immediately, will be the standardization of wait time for submissions in batch after they've received judge notes to 1 month. This means that if a file gets a 'Fixes Required' (formerly Conditional Queue) status, and receives zero response from the stepartist in that time period, it will be rejected. Likewise, zero response for accepted files will be moved forward through the batch system for difficulty rating after 1 month.

For files that do receive comments, responses, or fixes, the wait time will be reduced to 2 weeks (14 days). The 2 week reduction will not take place for already closed batches, only the open batches at the time of this post (OT15, event token, Jan/Feb) due to checkboxes being added that will allow such expediting of files in batch.

On the topic of 'adding checkboxes', there will be an added checkbox when responding to a 'Change Recommended' (formerly Light Accept) status in batch. If your song receives this status, you must read/acknowledge the notes provided by the judges by checking this box before the song can be accepted. This is being introduced to help provide a meaningful difference between 'Accepted' and 'Light Accept', and also help facilitate the initial purpose of 'Change Recommended', which was to heavily recommend fixes rather than require fixes (CQ/Fixes Required) or not worry about them (Accepted). This gives Stepartists the room to still treat the file as 'Accepted', but acknowledge judge notes/fixes in the process. Songs with the 'Change Recommended' status that do not get a response within the 1 month wait period will be rejected. This will not be enacted until judgments start coming out for the currently open batches (OT15, event token, Jan/Feb) and will not affect currently closed batches.

Furthermore, there will be a checkbox available when submitting fixes for a file that allows you to mark a set of submitted fixes as "The last fix for the song". Doing so will tell us that you are done working on the song, and we will make sure it isn't subjected to the full 1 month wait period by pushing it forward to Difficulty Consultants to be rated.

Lastly, there has been some conversation batch-wise recently about songs being rejected for song choice. After a fair bit of deliberation on the topic, we decided that the system for rejection over song choice will be as follows:
A judge finds that a particular song has extremely harsh noise or unpleasant sounds/peaks within the file. The song is then shared across all judges, for input on if it's something acceptable as-is, or would need changes to the audio itself to be acceptable. In the case where the audio itself needs changes, that information will then be relayed to the stepartist, under a 'Fixes Required' (formerly Conditional Queue) status at a maximum. If no fixes to the audio are received within the 1 month wait time, then it will be rejected.

tl;dr
Light Accept = Change Recommended
Conditional Queue = Fixes Required
Time between judge notes to rejection/accept for changes is 1 month.
It's 2 weeks if you make fixes/responses early.
New checkbox for read/acknowledging notes for Change Recommended status.
New checkbox for submitting final fixed version for all statuses.
We can/will set 'Fixes Required' status for abrasive/hard-to-listen-to audio in songs.
This will all start to be enforced once the current batches close, except for the name change of 'Light Accept' & 'Conditional Queue', that starts today.