Shmoop.com - ACE courses Locked Out this morning (9/17)

[CGaboury]

From what I can gather from just using their services, their online product is in its infancy. The UI is pretty poor. Their written materials are clearly in need of a review. It is riddled with typos. Also, a lot of their methods are very simple. This was made clear by the way in which they shut off access by instituting a redirect at first. Once that wasn't effective, they started passing your subscription status in through on of their cookies. This has no back end validation. Once you were cookied in, you were good. This was easily defeated by using firebug on my Firefox browser and altering the subscription cookie to reflect a subscription status that I didn't have.

With that said, I'll give them a pass. I think they are trying to work on it and they are struggling to build the tools needed to provide this online service effectively.

[High_Order1]

I can't even register.

I've been trying on and off for about two weeks. All I get is 'registration failed'.... lol

[bjcheung77]

Do you have a screenshot? There usually would be an error showing somewhere. Try again with IE.
I think it could also be your browser. You may want to change it to Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.

[hsfamfun]

I got an email from Shmoop this morning and it looks like my son has his access back. We are headed out to his dual-enrollment classes, so we don't have time to see if it works, but he can now access the dashboard of his history classes! That is progress!

[CGaboury]

Seems to work for me. I have access to the classes that I had previously started. So that seems fair to me. Unfortunately that means I need to continue with my history. Ugh...the gilded age kicked my ass.

[CGaboury]

it worked for me this morning when I woke up and checked the site. However around 10AM EST the site went down. When It came back up it was not providing access to my courses again. It appears their solution to fix their outage was to roll back whatever fix was implemented. This is starting to get frustrating. I certainly hope we are credited with the days lost due to the services being down. I paid for a month of access.

[bjcheung77]

Yes, It's working for me as well. I tested it the day they bumped up the price as I renewed my membership then as well.
I have been grandfathered into the $25/month and am taking Finite Math and Geometry for now...waiting for more ACE approval.
Hoping they get the literature courses up and i'll just pay $87-88 next month to take those for extra elective credits.