Tuesday, Oct 25 at 1am (MDT) we plan to move Prep.BubbleScan.net to a new server – and a new domain. We will take the system offline for about 2 hours (1-3am MDT) to move the entire database.
The biggest change will be that the url to access your online account will change. We will setup a forward for Prep.BubbleScan.net to the new url so you and your students will still be able to log in using your current prep.bubblescan.com/company/xyz url. Also any embedded links on your web site will still work. But if you are hosting the login panel on your site or if you are using the API to bypass the login or create accounts programmatically, you would most likely need to change that on Oct 25th.
This is a tentative plan and we are very much interested in hearing from ALL of you. Let us know that you received this information and let us know of any concerns.
We also could use some feedback on what url to settle on. We have 3 options:
- preptests.org
- myPrepTests.com
- OnlineScoreTracker.com
We understand that some of you are (rightfully) very interested in maintaining as much of a corporate identify throughout your student’s online experience as possible. By changing the url to a more generic name that is not connected to any of our domain names we think we are accomplishing this better.
Please let us know your preference for the url and also if there is one option you are very much against.
Aside from the very significant url change, the new web site will also receive a face lift. The basic functionality will not change and the look-and-feel will not be dramatically different either, just updated.
Other things in the immediate pipeline:
Next week we will announce the ability for students to log in with a true USERNAME in addition to logging in with their Student ID. The Username can be changed by the student.
The week after we hope to release the ability for a student to self-register. Some of you might use this feature to win new customers by offering a free test grading on your site (use the freely available official ACT practice tests 1572CPRE). A student signs up and takes the test and you have their details to offer additional services.
Our re-write of WebOMR (which manages the uploading and conversion of scanned tests) is almost complete. We definitely plan to release that sometime in October – probably on the new site Oct 25. The initial release won’t change much of the current process, just makes it more robust – particularly the at times misleading incorrect statistics on the upload page. Mostly, it gives us a starting place for future enhancements.
The OMR engine is getting updated to where it reads ‘the darkest bubble’. This should help eliminate the issue with stray marks and poor erasures causing us to report double marks. Better handling shrunk pages is the next issue we will address.
I thank you for your continued support. It’s been wonderful to build this community of tutoring companies around BubbleScan.