Website Problems [Now Fixed]

Updated 2016-11-19: The website problems have been fixed, so we are staying with Plan A – proposal submission via the website. The deadline for submissions is 2016-12-02 – see Call for Sessions for details of submitting a session proposal.

As anyone who has tried to submit a proposal for ACCU 2017 has discovered, there are some serious problems with the Flask application. Failure to acknowledge a submission is one, not being able to submit more than one is another. Plus a whole collection of the buttons do the wrong thing. Sadly, for various reasons, the people who were developing the website have not been able to contribute for a while. Clearly this is ending up in a minor crisis. I guess this being a volunteer software development with a deadline, serious problems were inevitable. The issue is avoiding a major crisis.

We are going to try and get the website working so as to put website submission back on track. Failing this we will have to revert to Plan B. Yes there is a Plan B, no worries there. The question is only when, if we have to call time on website submission, we call time on website submission.

In any event we are going to extend the submission deadline as the current one is unreasonable in the circumstances. We are trying to decide what is the fairest date to set. Current thinking is people should be given at least three weeks of reasonable submission time. Let’s see if we can fix the website…

PS If you know anyone who wants a speaker deal ACCU 2017 ticket, and can be a major contributor to fixing this Flask/Jinja2/SQLAlchemy point them to the GitHub repository and get them to start getting the pull requests that add tests and fix the bugs rolling in.

PPS There is the possibility of some budget to hire a person for a short time to work on this if they can show they are capable and able to fix the Flask application very quickly. Anyone in this category should contact the conference chair.