November 16 to November 20, 2015

Features & Improvements

"Campus Life," he said, terse, unblinking. The reader, confident that the man would not say more, directed his eyes to the Populi blog.

"Editable Inquiry Sources?" The reader stared back at him. The man only nodded, mouthing words to the effect of, "Yes, you can now edit the source field on an admissions inquiry."

Bugfixes

If a user tried to refund a credit balance using Internet Explorer 11 and entered an invalid amount, they would get a white screen instead of something sensible like an error message. Having added something to those fields that they call proper validation, the developers now ensure that such users will now get an error message.

It was complete madness. The IPEDS report said there were dozens more females at the school than there possibly could have been. Upon closer inspection, it was determined that many of those "females" were those known to Populi as unknown gender. The scope of the problem came clearly into view: the IPEDS report considered those of unknown gender as female, and skewed the statistics accordingly. Though this no longer happens, it is a warning to us all to enter the correct gender for the people in our respective systems.

If we're being honest, all things in Populi happen "online". Thing is, truth is sometimes multi-faceted. Thus we could look with disapproval upon certain automatically-applied invoice payments that said they were made online: in reality, a student had left a check at the bursar's office, or a mysterious donor had left a duffel full of one-dollar bills in remittance of a student's charges. We had to do something, and this is what we did: if a payment was not made by someone paying online with a credit card, it is now impossible to call that an online payment. It is unseemly to brag, but we believe we've made the world a less confusing place.

Indeed, if you are printing a mailing label or envelope meant for an address in your own country, there is absolutely no need to include the country in the mailing address. A customer mentioned this to us in a way we could not ignore, and we set to work on it. We speak confidently when we say that no longer will USA appear on mailing labels sent from our American schools.

Again with the IPEDS reports, this one from the financial aid portion: the living arrangements tallies and Group 4 income level figures perplexed our users. We have fixed the wayward calculations.