Well, the college replaced a bunch of outdated database software over the last couple of years, mostly having to do with student records and human resources.  The old collection of software had many absurdities, such as a terminal-based transcript viewer with no “page up” feature.  (How can you not have “page up”?)

However, the new portal software has its 21st century absurdities.  For example:

password form that remembers the password but not the user name

The portal page requires you to log in with a use name and password.  Something about how the form is set up allows Firefox to rememer the password but not the user name.

Change password right now!

The system is absolutely paranoid about changing passwords.  Every few months, it decides that you have to change your password right this minute, no warning, no alternative… And it’s really picky: you can’t even sort of repeat a password, it has to be something impossible to remember, it has to include one of these special characters, and you can’t log in until you change it.  Typically, it decides to do this to me right when I need to sign in to get a file to show during a class, and I don’t have time to think of a memorable password that it will accept.  The real stink is that this same password is used for the course managment system,  e-mail, the blogs, the forums, everything, so I have to go around and update my mail readers, passwords stored in all my web browsers, etc.

time out

To top it all off, once you are logged in, you have to keep doing stuff within it or it’ll time out and log you off.  I haven’t used a stopwatch, but it feels like it takes all of about two minutes to time out.  So if I stop to answer the phone, look up something, or go to the bathroom, time out! I have to log in again.  Which wouldn’t be so much trouble, except that there are so many layers of menus and lists of links that it takes me a long couple of minutes to figure out how to get back to where I was…

session expires message

Plus, there’s this problem: There’s some complicated bug that used to bite me all the time where my session expired and it gives me an error message promising I can click a link and log in again.  But when I click the link, it just takes me back to the same error message.  I have to exit the browser to log in again, thereby closing off any other web applications I might be using.  This hasn’t been so bad lately, and I don’t know whether it’s due to a bug fix in the college’s web system or a change in firefox or what.

I would be a bit more patient about these security features if it weren’t for the fact that other security mis-features around campus make it all totally worthless.

Too many courses

Another bit of madness: I have three course sections this semester (2 of business calculus and 1 of real analysis).  I have three course sections plus an independent study for next semester (the fall).  This is basically 7 lines of information.  However, it would seem that the portal feels a great need to protect me from information overload.  It won’t show that many courses in the little faculty dashboard block.  So I have to click on the link of “active assignments” which takes me to a page listing all 7 courses in overwhelming detail.  Gee thanks.