The New UWRobot is Coming!

Are you ready for Spring 2010 registration? We are!

In just a little bit, we'll be unveiling the all new UWRobot, just in time for spring quarter registration! For over 3 months, we've been working on a completely new UWRobot. The new site is faster, more user-friendly, and the notifiers are more effective than ever before.

While we clean up from our old website, we're putting this temporary "under construction" style page up, sorry! But, just so you know what's going on and what to expect for next quarter, we've added a little preview section below.

Thanks for supporting UWRobot! See you soon for spring quarter registration!

"State of the Robots"

2009 saw major adoption for UWRobot's services. When we launched in April, 2009, we only served 40 people in finding course openings for the summer quarter. For fall quarter, we helped 207 students find course openings. And for Winter quarter, we helped an amazing 1,522 students find course openings with a 91% success rate.

The pie chart on the right shows the success rate for the course notifier. The three bluish regions recognize successful course openings found. The biggest slice being students finding a single course opening, the next biggest show the number of students who found two course openings, and so on. The grey slice, which is 9% of the chart, are the students who never found a course opening, unfortunately.

Shiny New Robots

Spring quarter 2010 brings an entirely new system for finding course openings. Here, we'll highlight a few of the new things to expect:

Automatic "Related SLN" Finder

By far the biggest complaint of the old system was that if someone wanted to be notified for 10 different lectures of the same class, that person would have to enter each SLN and their contact information in 10 different times. How tedious!

With the new system, just enter one of the SLNs, and we'll find the rest for you, including other lectures, quiz sections, labs, etc. Could it really be that easy? Yeah, its that easy.

AIM Notifications in addition to SMS and Email

Do you use AOL Instant Messenger? Well you can now be notified via AIM, as well as SMS and Email. That's right, when we detect a course opening, we basically SCREAM TO YOU about it. Not only do we immediately send you an email and text message, but we can now, optionally, instant message you. Now that's service!

Sorry, we're still working on getting personal runners to run to your door to notify you. The whole child labor law things are kind of holding us back. (Just joking)

"How's that Notifier Doing?"

The old system, just like the new system, was a "set it and forget it" system. But sometimes, its good to know that your notifiers are working. So while you can still just forget about it, you can also now check on the status of your notifiers, and can see when the last time your SLNs were checked (although I promise it'll probably be less than 10 seconds prior to that moment).

Its Fast. Really Fast.

The "old" system could process a single SLN every 5 seconds, and only 1 SLN every 5 seconds. That means that during our peak, when we had around 20,000 SLNs, we were only processing 1 SLN every 2 hours. Yeah, yeah, not very "instant" I know. But we still maintained our 91% success rate!

The new system can process 2000 SLNs every single second. That means that during our peak load from last quarter, our new system can handle every SLN in 10 seconds. That is pretty fast! Super fast!