Time for a MUGSI CAPTCHA.

There are automatic clicker extensions for Chrome, which I've heard are fairly effective

What Chrome extension are you using? Share link

I can't find #current.im under Demo-Firefox. What should I do?

Any of the .im files will do just fine.

What if everyone starts using it? You will not be able to join anyway. And when you are using, you are basically ripping off someone else who can't join, so at the end there's still a bottleneck.

I think at this point, McMaster might as well start using mail pigeons, won't do any worse.

Originally Posted by BlackSheepWa

The problem is the ineptitude of the administrators which affects people who are paying a lot of money to be here. Most new kids coming in are young, and inexperienced and this will be the first major financial undertaking they will make.

They try to get the courses they need and then they have to go through hoops in order to get a spot. Then, they have to spend hours hoping to get into SOLAR to select their classes and if they are lucky, the class won't be full yet.

This is lunacy, to expect paying customers to line up and click a button hundreds of times to get in. You could say "nobody is forcing anyone to click a button and wait hours to get onto Solar". But that's not fair and it's very deceitful. You put people to compete against each other in order to get into classes. It invokes the "Screw you, I got mine" mentality and the "If I don't get in now, someone else will before me" mentality.

Can you imagine if any business was run like this? Could you imagine if TD Canada told me to refresh the page before I could log in to make payments? I would switch in a heartbeat. Thats free market at work. More over, I'm at work right now and I had to waste my morning to re arrange a course and to get in. I wasted company time for SOLAR but luckily my boss was understanding. What we have here at McMaster is no incentive for them to change anything for the better. Like any bureacratic beast, it sucks in cash and spits out waste.

What I should expect from a university that prides itself on being innovative and ahead of the curve in the 21st century is a scaleable server that can handle at least 20,000 connections at once. If you cannot even design your software and servers to handle 20,000 people concurrently (the max amount of students if everyone were to log in at once) then you are drag on public resources. MacInsiders can handle 20,000 people at once but McMaster can't. Give me a break, there is no defending what is going on here. Any systems / network engineer worth his salt would create a queue system or would instruct the servers to deny any new connections so that the servers feeding the homepage and other components do not crash at 9:30 am on a weekday.

World class, yea right.

Hereee we go again sigh

So, Back in Winter 2010 McMaster did actually kick start a $50 Million Enterprise Resource Planning integrated systems project to replace the cobwebbed, randomly modified legacy systems from the 90's that the entire University was being held together by.

I've been the student rep on the Steering Committee of the project (which used to be called Systems Renewal but is now called MOSAIC) and have spent over 300 hours in countless fit/gap workshops, design and stakeholder consultation meetings since the new ERP system will affect thousands of workers and variables.

The new system comes packaged with a state of the art Oracle powered student registration system which will go live in Summer 2015, which is honestly the earliest it could go since the resources project while high priority cannot takeover the day to day job of the relevant staff members for long periods of time.

You can check out the website here: http://www.mcmaster.ca/mosaic/index.html

It's not as simple as designing a simple server better or adding more bandwidth or other random and "obvious" suggestions I've seen thrown out (even by CompScis oddly enough); ERP systems are interconnected and they all have to be built together which takes time.

While not the best advertised, the Sillhouette newspaper did a few feature articles on this project (especially last year); I would highly suggest everyone to make it a habit of skimming through that free newspaper in print or online to keep up to date with what's happening on campus.

Year after Year I've seen impassioned rants about SOLAR and time after time I've had to do this spiel, which I definitely needed to in the past since the project was more underground but starting last year has become fully public.

julianface, you are amazing! THANK YOU.

Guys with some computer literacy, here's the basic concept of a simple script with no parsing or any complicated stuff that got through in 5 minutes: Open https://adweb.cis.mcmaster.ca /mugsi/si0 once every 1000ms, loop 120 times. Check back in 2 minutes, or keep the window in the corner of your eye. When complete, manually fly through all the tabs quickly to check for lack of red bar/presence of black text. If not, repeat. If yes, curse SOLAR and enjoy the rest of your midnight.

Oh my goodness. I can't believe what I'm going through right now. I literally think I'll be up all night trying to just get in.

Your method was fantastic. It worked the first try. But idek what I touched or what happened but the next thing I know, I'm logged out. My 45 minutes had practically just begun. This was at 12:45am. It is now 1:30 and I'm still trying to get back in and still using this method. It's becoming so frustrating and I want to throw my laptop at the wall.

God bless you for this clever little way to get into SOLAR. It really does work. I'm finally done. Although two of the courses I wanted to take were completely full by the time I really got started

I'm gonna for sure be using this again next year

how do you unzip the autosolar on a mac? it wont let me on terminal

I wish I had stumbled across this method last year or even earlier this year.. But as everyone says, there's always next year!

The thing that REALLY angers me is when people log on to SOLAR and TAKE UP THE ENTIRE 45 MINS just loitering and waiting for their course to miraculously become available OR when people take up seats in unnecessary courses AND THEN SELL/TRADE THEM ON FACEBOOK/SOCIAL MEDIA! WHY CAN'T PEOPLE PREPLAN THEIR COURSES/TIMETABLES AND JUST JUMP ON, DO THEIR THING AND JUMP OFF RIGHT AWAY? Seriously, it only takes me 10, 15 mins at max and I plan out my schedule on Timetable Generator weeks before SOLAR opens!!! It's called being organized people! A very important skill in life!

Ah, but next year we say goodbye to Solar and pray that Mosaic is better.

Originally Posted by shahl

I wish I had stumbled across this method last year or even earlier this year.. But as everyone says, there's always next year!

The thing that REALLY angers me is when people log on to SOLAR and TAKE UP THE ENTIRE 45 MINS just loitering and waiting for their course to miraculously become available OR when people take up seats in unnecessary courses AND THEN SELL/TRADE THEM ON FACEBOOK/SOCIAL MEDIA! WHY CAN'T PEOPLE PREPLAN THEIR COURSES/TIMETABLES AND JUST JUMP ON, DO THEIR THING AND JUMP OFF RIGHT AWAY? Seriously, it only takes me 10, 15 mins at max and I plan out my schedule on Timetable Generator weeks before SOLAR opens!!! It's called being organized people! A very important skill in life!

uh no, its not that simple. alot of people (myself included) plan days ahead of our scheduled times but it doesn't always work out. some labs/tutorials are full with only crap time slots. some electives already full. unless you get on really early, its hard to actually match your planned timetable.