Tuesday, March 03, 2015

Hate EasyChair

I just typed in a nice long review on EasyChair.  Yes, I prefer doing this with the online form when I'm just sitting around and have time to do a review. 

Apparently I didn't hit one of the score buttons (although I'm pretty sure I did, let's give EasyChair the benefit of the doubt there) so EasyChair says there's an error and, of course, forgets my nice long typed review when it takes me back to the review page, so I'll get to re-do and re-type it later. 

Sigh.  I guess I'll go back to doing my reviews in a text file and cutting and pasting.  No, this has not happened to me in recent memory in HotCRP.  Put this down as one more reason (but not the only one) why I don't like EasyChair and would prefer a better designed system (like HotCRP...).


5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I share the sentiment. For the first PC I chaired, I used easy chair. Ever since, I have been using Shai Halevi's software!

Oded said...

Another annoying thing about EasyChair is that as a reviewer, it takes me about 10 minutes to figure out how to accept/decline a review request. First I need to log in to EasyChair (no link provided in the email!), then figure out what my username/password is (why can't it remember me?), then navigate to the right conference (there are about 20 listed there for me), then navigate to the submission I was asked about (often 2 or 3...), and then accept/decline the invitation. I would then have to repeat the process when times comes to enter my report. With any other system I know, accepting a review is as easy as clicking on a link.

Michael Mitzenmacher said...

I nod in agreement with Omer and Oded. (Oded, you have so accurately described what I have painfully experienced myself multiple times...)

Anonymous said...

Using Lazarus (http://www.getlazarus.org/) to automatically save all text input fields has saved me so many times from similar situations, that I can't really understand why it is not more common.

Anonymous said...

And i of course meant http://getlazarus.com/download and not getlazarus.org.