Because of an overloaded system and a computer glitch, many Ohio University students' housing requests for next year were never received by residence services. Housing registration times were pushed back, and some students never officially registered.
Stages I and II -same room and inter-complex changes -went smoothly, said Christine Sheets, director of business and residence services, but at Stage III -building changes -students ran into problems.
At about 9:40 a.m. Sunday, the system crashed because of a problem between the Web server and the database, said Tom Perry, project leader of computer services.
The server connection was not restored until 12:30, pushing back all registration times by about two hours.
Many students grappled with slow connections and misconnections.
I was on the Web site trying to schedule all day. Having the times pushed back two hours
on top of the server being busy was frustrating for me said freshman Cassidie Peattie.
But Pamela Drake, associate director of residence services, said the server slow-down was because more students were on the site than it could handle.
Instead of having the 60 people we allotted to go in
sometimes we were having 80 to 100 people trying to get into the system
Drake said.
Sheets said despite some students' perceptions that they lost the room they wanted because the server was down, no student lost his or her room selection priority by the changed times, because everyone was rescheduled to two hours later.
Due to the bogged down system, as Drake called it, about 50 students were also unable to see a confirmation button on the second-to-last page because it had an x over it.
Freshman education major Amy Bare said, When I finally got to what I thought was the last page
there wasn't a button to finalize
so I read the 'please note that after this point it's final' and thought I was finished.
Many other students also thought the process was over but later received an e-mail stating that they did not yet have a room.
Drake said, despite the small bump
she was happy with how the second year of electronic housing arrangements worked out -saying less than 5 percent of students nee to reregister.
We have made a decision to accommodate as many requests as we can. We are going to err in favor of the students. And I think that is the best thing we can do at this point
she said.
Online room selections are far more superior then what we had before
Drake said. The previous process involved a cattle-type line in which students waited to register.
Drake said in the three hours when the server was down, three housing employees answered about 1,600 telephone calls.
Students who still have problems can contact Drake at the Housing Office at 593-4090.
Students can evaluate the registration process at http://www.facilities.ohiou.edu/housing/rs/urs/eval/eval.php and could win $633 of room credit for filling out the evaluation.
