Room Pix for single and double rooms will be restarted Tuesday night, after problems with the server precluded students from registering for housing this weekend for the next academic year, Residence Life and Housing Services officials announced Friday night.
Out of approximately 300 rising sophomores and juniors whose single-room lottery windows opened Friday night, more than half were unable to log in to the online Room Pix system or were unable to select a room once logged in, said Marijean Williams, director of housing assignments and communications.
"We made the decision to stop the process and restart it on Tuesday with single rooms again," Williams said, adding that triple-room selection, which occurred Thursday night, proceeded successfully and will not be restarting.
This is the first year Room Pix has been conducted online.
Students attempting to select a single room said only 30 to 40 rooms were taken by the end of the night. All students who completed room selection Friday night, however, must also restart the process.
"We thought it was unfair that not everyone had the same opportunity to log in at the same time," Williams said. "The fairest and most consistent thing to do was to restart."
She added that students were able to log in sporadically throughout the night outside their own registration windows, and some students were unable to log in at all.
RLHS will work Monday with the Office of Information Technology and Residential Management Systems-the company that developed the platform Room Pix '07 runs on-to figure out what is slowing the server down, Williams said.
She noted that the server ran slowly during the triple-room selection process, but RLHS asked OIT to restart the server, which seemed to have solved the problem.
"We did extensive testing [before Thursday night] and we had other problems that we worked out, but nothing ever with the server," Williams said, adding that approximately 10 to 12 accounts-as many as were assigned to each registration window-were logged in at a time during the testing stages.
Depending on the feedback from OIT and RMS, RLHS will make a decision to run Room Pix online or revert to the old process, in which all rooms are assigned in person in Gilbert-Addoms Residence Hall, Williams said.
RLHS officials will conduct "serious testing" before Tuesday night if they choose to continue with the online process, she added.
Students will be assigned individual lottery numbers according to their lottery group if Room Pix is conducted face-to-face, Williams said, adding that these numbers are already generated and will be distributed to students when needed.
Those who attempted to find a room Friday night said the process was frustrating but RLHS did the right thing in restarting it.
"It was stressful, annoying and a waste of my night," sophomore Jessica Davlin said.
Davlin said she was at a computer cluster with approximately 10 other students Friday night trying to complete the process.
"Everyone's computer was frozen, no one's was working," Davlin said. "I was sitting there for a couple of hours-I think everyone in the room, at one point or another, called RLHS."
Others who were able to log in said the online process itself was hard to follow.
"It was so slow that the timer ran out," sophomore Sara Murray said.
She added that the system would display rooms as available, but the rooms could not be selected.
Some students said that although the face-to-face process takes much longer, they would prefer to go back to it.
"The whole [online] process is really confusing because it's new," sophomore Lauren Tam said. "Even though last year the whole thing was really hectic, it was not as chaotic as this year."
Students who were not entered in the single-room lottery said they were not affected by the delay, but some were worried that their selection process would run into similar problems.
"I was relieved when I got the e-mail," junior Adam Finkelstein said. "There would be more students [in the double-room lottery], it would have been even slower."
Williams said RLHS received very positive feedback, however, from the students who were able to complete the process.
"This is new this year and has never been tried before, so it's expected that there's going to be a few glitches," said junior Ryan Todd, incoming president of Campus Council. "If the new software works out, it will make the process much easier."
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