So the NUS Registration system has been online for about a week. 301 people have registered or updated their accounts, but naturally there have been a couple teething troubles which I'm working through now.
- One problem is that some people have reported problems when creating a sign-in name - the new registration system checks a list of (currently) around 300 offensive and reserved words, and if one of them appears anywhere in the new name, the system comes back and says it's reserved. For example, "superstitious" comtains a three-letter reference to the female form, so it wouldn't be acceptable.
I currently can't reproduce a problem where some people are saying they're unable to enter any sign in names at all that are allowed, so I'm at a bit of a loss to suggest what they should do, or where to look in the code. Fingers crossed it's PEBKAC, but it'll probably be something horrifically complex knowing my luck ;o)
- The other problem is that a number of people (currently about one in ten) upgrading their accounts are receiving an error saying we weren't able to upgrade their accounts.
It looks like the cause of this is the registration system losing track of their account ID somewhere in the registration process. Again, this is probably something horrifically complex, but it's very odd that their ID - which should be set in their user cookie when they sign in (which they have to do to upgrade an existing account) is suddenly unavailable. I can only assume (at his point) that they are being signed out at some point during the registration process.
The two problems are a bit odd, but hopefully we'll get around them. If you've been affected by these problems, or any other with the registration process, I'm very sorry - please post a comment below detailing what's gone wrong. I won't publish them, but I will look into them (so please leave a contact e-mail address), or you can e-mail us the normal way from
this webpage.
