Sunday, July 4, 2010

Why you're still getting requests outside of your available times (and what we're doing about it)

Some of you may be wondering why some students manage to make requests outside of your available times. How did these requests possibly slip through! Are the guys at Cafetalk completely incompetent monkeys?

Well, monkeys we are, but there is some reasoning behind what we do - let me clarify how this works.

The first thing you should know is that the system does allow students to make requests outside of a tutor's declared available times. This is because students may be doing so based on a prior agreement with the tutor. (I certainly allow some of my students to make requests at strange hours in the morning because I value their patronage. But I don't want to openly advertise the fact to the entire world or I'd go insane pretty quickly)

So that's that, and we don't plan to disallow this any time soon.

What we have done however, is generate warnings so students will know that the times they have requested are outside of the tutor's available schedule.

And we also have something similar when a student tries to schedule a lesson with less than 24 hours notice.

These changes were implemented only a few days ago. Hopefully you won't be getting any more strange requests unless you're expecting them.

P.S. Thank you Dan for the suggestions that led us to put this in place.

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