The ATF Chatlines are brand new this year, having been piloted in two ATFs during the Spring. We are hoping that you will find the system to be friendly and functional - but if you have problems using it, please contact us! We're keeping a list of enhancement requests to roll into future releases of the Chatlines - please let us know what you'd like to add to the list. Question: I'm a meeting chair, but not an assigned host - and the system won't let me add meeting host information! What should I do? Answer: Contact Amy Fountain or Gretchen Schmidt so that we can assist you in posting meeting information and map links in the chatlines. Question: I never received/can't remember my login information. Who do I contact for my username and password? Answer: Contact Amy Fountain for your login information. Question: I entered a web address for a map to my meeting, but when I click on the link from the calendar, I get a "your session has timed out" message. What's wrong? Answer: When you type in a web address, you must type in the entire address, beginning with "http://..." If you leave out the "http://", the system will treat the address as a local one (somewhere within the application's own web domain), instead of linking to an external website. The error message you see is a result of the system trying to link within its own domain. Question: I logged into the system, but there's no chair report waiting for me to complete. What should I do? Answer: Contact your meeting's ATAC facilitator to be sure that a form has been created for your review. Question: I used cut and paste to copy text from a Word document or web page into my meeting agenda, and when I hit "save" I got an error message. Now I can't save my agenda. What should I do? Answer: We've found that using cut and paste out of Word or html into the agenda is likely to create character length limit overruns. This is because these applications often involve hidden characters that are many bytes long, but that you can't see as you cut/paste or view the documents. When you try to save the pasted elements, you'll get an error message saying a field could not be saved, and sometimes you'll have to close down the browser window and restart it (usually it's best to wait a few minutes in between the crash and the restart). This can happen even if the text you're cutting and pasting is short - the hidden characters can cause a length limit overrun even if there are very few visible characters in the selection. To avoid this problem, you need to type the information directly into the agenda. Unfortunately, it can sometimes take the application a few minutes to reset, and during that time you may not be able to save your agenda at all. You will need to close your browser window entirely, and come back to open a new session in a few minutes. Question: I accidentally created my agenda under an old meeting listing. Can I move the agenda I've already created to another meeting date? Answer: Although there is no way to do this in a single move, you can cut and paste text from your old agenda into a new one, block by block. Just be sure to save the new agenda file each time you've pasted new text into it, before going back to the old agenda. Question: I edited my meeting agenda or meeting information, saved the changes, and everything seemed to work fine. But then I looked at the calendar, and it seems that none of my changes appeared. What happened? Answer: The Chatlines application runs in a number of different "instances". It may take a few minutes after you click "save" for all instances of the application to receive the newly saved information. Often, if you look for your changes in the system very quickly after you've made them, it will appear that the changes are not there. Try back in a few minutes, and it is likely that the changes will be visible. Question: The Chatlines gave me an error message when I saved my agenda - and now I can't access the system/save any changes. What should I do? Answer: Some kinds of errors take a while to clear out of the system, because bad data has been saved to the system buffer. Most errors will clear if you exit the system, close the browser window, and then open a new instance of the browser and log in again. If an error is particularly bad, the system may need to be restarted entirely. The chatlines application is automatically restarted once per day, in the early hours of the morning. If accessing the system today is an emergency, it may be possible for the support team to restart the system manually. Contact Amy Fountain if you need the system to be restarted. Question: I think it's really important that the chatlines be able to do something that I'm told can't currently be done. What should I do? Answer: The Chatlines are brand new, and the functionality is still a bit limited. Please send your enhancement suggestions to Amy Fountain. We will collect these suggestions from you and work on rolling out as many new features as we can for the Chatlines in the next academic year! Back to the AzCAS Faculty Index page |