WebAdvisor. There, I said it.
For more than a few of you, that word probably seems strange without a few choice curses to go along with it.
Love it or leave it, if you go to STU you’ve no choice but to use it.
WebAdvisor is the one-stop destination for most of your academic needs at STU.
Most of the time it works great, but damned if there isn’t that one day of the year when it fouls up worse than a Toyota accelerator pedal.
We all have a nightmare story or two, but here are a few that I think are fairly typical.
“Well, I got up at six because I’m crazy,” said third-year student Rebekah Wheadon of her recent online course registration experience. “It took me five minutes to login, five minutes for every change I made and five minutes to load between pages.”
“Took about an hour to get to the main page. From there it took about 20 minutes just to get to my next selection,” added Danie Pitre, also in third year.
Animosity towards WebAdvisor is running high right now.
I myself have been caught raging against the thing (in my defense I’m not at my most charitable at 6 a.m.).
However, as IT Services Manager Dan Hurley pointed out to me, it’s not all unicorns and bunnies on their end.
“Web Advisor’s a bit of a known beast here at ITS. We’ve had problems with it a number of years running now,” he said. “At the base of the situation is that it’s like running any kind of website where most days you’ll have a few people visiting, doing a few things at a time. Then there’s a couple days a year when there are hundreds of people who want to do something fairly complicated at once.”
Of course the solution that many people shout at their computers come course registration time is to simply upgrade the system to handle all that traffic.
But there are only a few days a year when that would make any sense.
The rest of the year the site gets relatively little use.
On top of that an upgrade would be expensive.
According to Hurley, the same kind of thing happens at other schools using the system.
So at least it’s not just STU.
It sounds like WebAdvisor will be here for a while, although Hurley did say an upgrade was coming down the pipe in the next few years.
In the meantime, most of us have survived the latest round of registrations.
We can be grateful the site works 95 per cent of the time.
