MDapplicants.com Relaunched

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I think the timing of relaunch was not perfect since this is the peak time for everyone to manage their applications, the last thing they want is losing their profiles....

but we are all with you on this...the site definitely looks more polished....


may I suggest adding the number of comments in a bracket near Discussion tab.....

I am not going to click Discussion tab for every profile I see just to find out there are no comments. It would help to see whether there are any comments and if yes, how many without clicking on the tab.
 
What about adding in the new schools, like Virginia Tech Carilion?

Also, I lol everytime I see "Virginia" spelled "Virgina." It's in there twice.

PS I also am kind of upset ppl can now see my undergrad school...but it's too slow to go deleting it now.
 
I like the old MDapps. It was simple, straight to the point. This is going to take some time getting used to.
 
I don't like the fact that you have to update each of the schools individually for it to save. Combined with how slow the site is being right now, it's painfully updating the information.
 
musicaldna said:
I think the timing of relaunch was not perfect since this is the peak time for everyone to manage their applications, the last thing they want is losing their profiles....
Click to expand...

I agree, this should have been done between application cycles or at low peak times.
 
First it was the facebook layout and now this too!!

I kinda liked how the old layout had eveything on one page
now theres all these tabs... cant see eveything at once
& its super slow :scared:
 
xaelia said:
Oh, and btw, links to your profile are now profile.php?id=# rather than to viewprofile.php
Click to expand...
just pointing this out for those getting the 404 error message in case you missed it. the url has changed so that may be why you cant find your mdapps..
ex. http://www.mdapplicants.com/viewprofile.php?id=00002 is now
http://www.mdapplicants.com/profile.php?id=00002 so links with the old one wouldn't work.
 
It seems to be working better for me now, but it still loads very slowly (about 3 minutes).

Is the view count since the profile was created or since the site was updated?
 
thanks for the service... the new site looks good.
 
xaelia said:
Best I can do is try and find their information from the old database and e-mail it to folks individually.

Sorry, no time for anything different right now.

Things will get better. Don't forget, you get this service for free. 😉
Click to expand...

Haha, I understand it's free. Thanks so much for all your time and hard work, I really like the new look. If you can somehow get the information from the old database and give us the information somehow (I really just care about my school list, secondary dates, and completion dates), you WOULD BE MY HERO!!! If not, I can make a new account and dig up all the information after I'm done with my secondaries... Just let us know! Thank you for your time in advance.

redlight said:
just pointing this out for those getting the 404 error message in case you missed it. the url has changed so that may be why you cant find your mdapps..
ex. http://www.mdapplicants.com/viewprofile.php?id=00002 is now
http://www.mdapplicants.com/profile.php?id=00002 so links with the old one wouldn't work.
Click to expand...

Primarily those who are getting the 404 error messages cannot even log in. Their e-mail or profile # is not even recognized. The link to my mdapp under my SDN username doesn't work, whereas someone whose account was successfully transferred to the new server still does. 🙁
 
You all are far too kind. All I can say is BLECH! It's pretty, but for what is basically a database, this new design is the pits. I liked it much better before. Don't fix what ain't broken.
 
Worked on some speed improvements last night; it was at least letting me log-in this AM without much fuss, though this isn't exactly peak hours. Yes - still overally intolerably slow. A step in the right direction, with plenty of room to throw more computing resources at it.

As for whether the old version needed the update or not - I don't know...search results that are 20-30 scrolling pages long, profiles with hundreds of comments and huge essays in the little "Application Experience" box just screamed for better management. Are there a lot of extraneous features thrown in on this update? Yeah. Are they slowing it down? Yeah. I do agree the scannability of the prior site was superior, and I'll keep tweaking this current iteration to improve that, but I really think that once the server isn't 9 years old, switching tabs will be nearly instantaneous and quite a bit more livable.

One note - if you're curious about whether a profile has new comments (and, until I figure out an elegant way to numerically indicate the number of comments in the tab bar), you can always track that profile and tweak your trackboard preferences so that you see on your myprofile page when that person receives a comment. I really put a lot of work into trying to make the update stream that comes into that trackboard highly customizable, so that you get updates that are highly relevant to your application experience and your usage of the site.
 
One little thing that I feel could be better is that when you update, you have to save information for each school instead of just making updates to all schools and then clicking save. This is really a problem now that it's so slow.
 
TANSTAAFL said:
You all are far too kind. All I can say is BLECH! It's pretty, but for what is basically a database, this new design is the pits. I liked it much better before. Don't fix what ain't broken.
Click to expand...

we're not kind, we're tactful... we may agree with you, but as has been stated numerous times, mdapps is FREE. no complaints 🙂
 
On mine, everything is there except for immediate acceptances. That school is checked properly on the edit page, but when I view my profile, it is nowhere to be found...
 
OO I just realized that the schools under "Application Complete, No News" are listed in the order of:

Ones didn't submit secondary yet
and
Earliest to most recent secondary submissions
 
How do I link someone to my profile now? I really preferred the old site.
 
URHere said:
On mine, everything is there except for immediate acceptances. That school is checked properly on the edit page, but when I view my profile, it is nowhere to be found...
Click to expand...

Drop me a PM with the specifics of what you've got checked off for the school in question, and i'll see if I can figure out why it's not displaying.
 
Equality said:
OO I just realized that the schools under "Application Complete, No News" are listed in the order of:

Ones didn't submit secondary yet
and
Earliest to most recent secondary submissions
Click to expand...

Planning on actually making those sort alphabetically; it's on my to-do list.

I hope folks are having a slightly better experience with the site today; I know certain operations such as adding schools, switching tabs, etc. are kind of laborious even with the brief delays, but I hope it's at least usably frustrating rather than unusably infuriating now.
 
CoolWhipp said:
I like the old MDapps. It was simple, straight to the point. This is going to take some time getting used to.
Click to expand...

Agreed, this new format is too choppy and confusing. Don't like it, don't like change, I'm reactionary!
 
xaelia said:
If you lost a profile - which for some reason happened to a lot of the profiles in the 17500s - or wanted to look at your old one in the old database for some reason, for the time being, you can access a broken-ish old version of View Profile by using a link fashioned as such:
http://mdapplicants.com/oldviewprofile.php?id=1
Click to expand...

Xaelia, may I suggest reverting everything back to the one-page format, but keeping the tabs which can take you directly to the spot on the page you desire (similar to websites which have answers to FAQ's)?
 
Beta Cell said:
Xaelia, may I suggest reverting everything back to the one-page format, but keeping the tabs which can take you directly to the spot on the page you desire (similar to websites which have answers to FAQ's)?
Click to expand...

oooh, i love this idea!
 
It won't let me alter dates for my applications. I tried to enter the dates my secondaries for some of my schools were verified, and I got a message saying "DATES MUST BE BETWEEN (today) and 1/1/2010" It's starting to annoy me.

It was better the way it was before. I'm a republican. Change scares me.
 
Beta Cell said:
Xaelia, may I suggest reverting everything back to the one-page format, but keeping the tabs which can take you directly to the spot on the page you desire (similar to websites which have answers to FAQ's)?
Click to expand...

Not a terrible idea - but I'm going to see how necessary that time investment is once a modern server is pushing the data to those tabs. Definitely a fair bit of internal structure I'd have to tweak for that.
 
GTV said:
It won't let me alter dates for my applications. I tried to enter the dates my secondaries for some of my schools were verified, and I got a message saying "DATES MUST BE BETWEEN (today) and 1/1/2010" It's starting to annoy me.

It was better the way it was before. I'm a republican. Change scares me.
Click to expand...
Check your AMCAS submission date; that's usually been the culprit. I've seen several of those sorts of complaints be solved once they notice they've put 2010 in for their appyear and they're trying to use '09 secondary, interview, etc dates. Put in 6/1/2009 or whatever day you submitted, and everything ought to work.
 
It's definitely working much better for me today. Loads within a few seconds, tab changes take 1 or 2 seconds.

I was also able to log in and change some information with no long load times. I couldn't change some of my dates at first, but I then altered the 2010 AMCAS submission date and everything works fine. Congratulations xaelia, it seems like you've got this thing up and running now.

EDIT: One glitch to report. I was recently rejected pre-secondary from a school, and although under that school's name it says I am rejected, for some reason the school is not grouped under the rejected category.
 
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So much faster, and the trackboard is so awesome!!!

When I search certain things where I should be a result, my profile doesn't show up. Any idea why?
 
JimmerJammerMrK said:
It's definitely working much better for me today. Loads within a few seconds, tab changes take 1 or 2 seconds.

I was also able to log in and change some information with no long load times. I couldn't change some of my dates at first, but I then altered the 2010 AMCAS submission date and everything works fine. Congratulations xaelia, it seems like you've got this thing up and running now.

EDIT: One glitch to report. I was recently rejected pre-secondary from a school, and although under that school's name it says I am rejected, for some reason the school is not grouped under the rejected category.
Click to expand...
...and this is just from database normalization and caching; still the 6+ year old hardware we're running on. Try to remember the computer you had six years ago, and imagine trying to use it today. The new server will hopefully help the site go from "functional" to "instantaneous".
 
xaelia said:
...and this is just from database normalization and caching; still the 6+ year old hardware we're running on. Try to remember the computer you had six years ago, and imagine trying to use it today. The new server will hopefully help the site go from "functional" to "instantaneous".
Click to expand...

I actually do still use it pretty often, but that's beside the point. Thanks again for your hard work and generosity with your time.
 
ksmi117 said:
When I search certain things where I should be a result, my profile doesn't show up. Any idea why?
Click to expand...

Search results come from a normalized table that is built once a day; last time I built the table, it took 1400 seconds. We held off on that periodic rebuild yesterday because the site was in such dire straits. We'll rebuild the normalized tables when site traffic is low late tonight, but we might continue with an irregular schedule of rebuilding until we have a faster server. With a real server, hopefully we'll be able to rebuild that table more frequently.
 
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Another thing to note for anyone who is interested:

If you had an interview listed, it now shows up as "interview attended" (automatically?). The easy fix is going under that school's category and unchecking the appropriate box. The category will then change to "invited for interview".
 
i must say, i am frustrated that there is no silhouette avatar with curly hair 😛
 
JimmerJammerMrK said:
Another thing to note for anyone who is interested:

If you had an interview listed, it now shows up as "interview attended" (automatically?). The easy fix is going under that school's category and unchecking the appropriate box. The category will then change to "invited for interview".
Click to expand...
Correct; this is a consequence of the legacy profiles from prior appliction cycles that were never going to be touched again. We decided to convert them all with Interview Invited and Interview Attended as true, and this is why some of you in the current cycle have also been inappropriately listed as Interview Attended.
 
xaelia said:
Correct; this is a consequence of the legacy profiles from prior appliction cycles that were never going to be touched again. We decided to convert them all with Interview Invited and Interview Attended as true, and this is why some of you in the current cycle have also been inappropriately listed as Interview Attended.
Click to expand...

I see, makes sense.

xaelia said:
The category has always been in the list, but was coded incorrectly and pointed to a nonexistent array.
Click to expand...

Cool. Works good now. 👍
 
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