Dylan Greene dot com

Starting now I'm officially working full time on TeacherReviews and my other projects, including this blog and the software that powers it.

A huge exciting change in a short bland blog entry.

Friends are coming over now to celebrate. If you know where I live, come on by!

Over the weekend I launched the preview of the new TeacherReviews.com.  It shows off the new look designed by foO.  Many of the new features I've been working on aren't part of the preview yet.  I figure something is better than nothing.  As I finish features I'll be adding them to the site. 

Also in TeacherReviews news, John Hicks of Hicks Design, who created the Firefox logo and Thunderbird logo for the Mozilla-based browser and email tools, will be creating the new logo for TeacherReviews.  He's extremely busy with other projects right now so we wont see his design until August, but the wait should be worth it.

To answer a lot of the questions being posted on my blog, I've put up a TeacherReviews FAQ.

Got more questions?  Post 'em here.

Earlier tonight I sent out emails with a private URL to the TeacherReviews preview site to the 50+ people who've helped support TeacherReviews with donations.  Thank you!

The preview participants are able to see the reviews, but most of the other features are disabled at the moment, including adding new reviews.  At the last minute I decided to disable the user system until I could do more testing, which means all of the features that require you to be signed in are disabled.  Security and ease-of-use are my two top priorities, and since I haven't done enough testing to be sure everything is perfect security-wise, I'd rather just hold off until I can make sure all of the code is secure.

The public preview will begin in a week or two, at which time everybody will finally be able to read and post reviews.  The site will officially re-launch once all of the important new features are complete.

I think tonight I'm going to go to bed early for once in the last few months.  I took off the last two days from my real job to get more TeacherReviews work done, so I've been programming for the last two days straight with small breaks for food, stretching, and some sleep.  My girlfriend is here patiently waiting for me and I've been ignoring her to work on this.  Time for me to step away from the computer... well until early tomorrow morning.  Can't wait to finish the user system!

I'm almost ready to launch the preview of the new TeacherReviews. The planned date is this Friday, rain or shine.

Some new features:

• Rate the reviews
• See the reviewer's average grades (so you don't have to wonder if they just give everybody bad grades)
• Easier access to the newest reviews

Some features not done yet:

• Professor customization (such as personal comments, links to syllabus)
• University customization (such as school photos)
• Searching
• Email notification when new reviews are posted

I'll be able to add features even once the site is up, so I'm not going to wait until everything is done before launching.

I think you'll be happy with the new site. It's fast and easy to use, and most importantly, all the old reviews are still there.

I've been re-writing TeacherReviews.com over the last month.  Everything is going great, the new system is fast, flexible, and easy to use.  I'm using the framework that I built to power this site, so reviews are treated like blog entries which means universities and professors automatically have RSS feeds and a feedback system. 

The look of the site is all new, and thanks to a helping hand from graphics and web guru FoO, the new TeacherReviews looks great and should perform perfectly on every modern browser.

Here's some screenshots to wet your appetite:

And more good news related to TeacherReviews:

An attorney with a background in litigation and First Amendment laws has volunteered to help me free of charge. He said he knows of other attorneys who may be willing to help as well. He also pointed me to the following organizations:

• The American Civil Liberties Union (www.aclu.org)
  "A lot of First Amendment experience, but traditionally very friendly with teachers' unions/groups"
• The Institute for Justice (www.ij.org)
  "Very interested in educational issues"
• The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE - www.thefire.org)
  "Students' First Amendment rights group"
• The Individual Rights Foundation (www.cpsc.org/irf.html)
  "I know they have been involved with some libel/slander defense work recently"

Amazing web designer foO has volunteered to take responsibility for the new TeacherReviews look. He'll give the new redesigned site a clean, professional look, while adding his trademark foO-touches that make his sites stand out: forgetfoo, alphafilter, gotfoo, foobloger.

I got a bunch of PayPal donations - thank you! One person even sent me a donation having "never used (or even seen) the site" - because he hates lawsuits. I couldn't agree more.

The Tuesday evening Slashdot article caused a huge jump in traffic for my web site:

• Visits to the site: Average 4,500/day. Yesterday: 400,000.
• Unique visitors: Average 2,500/day. Yesterday: 28,000.
• Pages viewed: Average 15,000/day. Yesterday: 777,000.

People have posted over 600 comments on the Slashdot article, over 300 comments on my blog entries, and sent me another 100 emails. Wow - There's a lot for me to catch up on... Scoble, tell me again how you stay caught up? I'm flying to Seattle this weekend so maybe I can catch up on all of these comments on the plane ride... Thank you again for your support.

I was planning on going to sleep early tonight, but some nice coverage on the uber-popular Slashdot.org geek news site has punted me back into my usual work state.

I'm glad to see that the site is taking the beating, at least so far. It's all homemade code running on a single Win2k3 box and I haven't performance tested it with this much traffic before. I had to make one small change because my database coding skills are lacking: random photo captions and live visitor stats are both turned off at the moment. I'm sure you don't mind. The credit that the server isn't even breaking a sweat (2-10% load) goes to Tim Macrina of QuickMortgageLoan.com.

The posting about TeacherReviews has been on Slashdot for only two hours and there are already 400 comments.

Some things I would like to clear up:

• "Letting professors remove reviews is going to make the site worthless."
  The only reviews that will be removed are those that are considered slanderous. There are a few reviews that are just students venting their anger at getting a bad grade and they have nothing to do with the professor.
  
• "On Monday Ebay won a case which says that they do not need to remove information that is false or libelous. This means you can leave the reviews up."
  I am also trying to improve the site. The new features will make the site better for students too.
  
• "What is going to determine that a review is removed?"
  I am adding features similar to the Slashdot moderation and meta-moderation system. I'll have more information about it as I build it.
  
• "You're a wuss for taking the site down, even if it's just temporary."
  Actually, I'm smart for taking it down: I don't have a lawyer. The advice I'm seeing posted in the comments here and on Slashdot are great, but I can't print those out and show them to a Judge as my defense. The ACLU has helped the site in the past, but they typically won't step in until there is actually a case to defend. I could get a lawyer, but TeacherReviews makes me no money and I don't have any money to spend on a lawyer. There's also the fact that I have a full-time job which is totally unrelated to TeacherReviews. A court hearing would require too much time and travel for me to be able to balance both. Since I really enjoy my job and it pays the bills, I must stay focused with it and take TeacherReviews down for a short while - at least until I finish re-coding it and added some new features.

I'll be launching the new site as I finish the features. You'll probably see the first set of features go online this weekend. Please be patient. The two or three week wait will be worth it.

TeacherReviews.com is coming back, and it's going to be better than ever - for both students and professors.

The professor who threatened a lawsuit has decided to drop the case. This happened after we talked about the situation, the site as it is today, and the intent of the site, which has always been to help students, as opposed to insult professors. This professor is now helping the site by providing feedback to the new features from a professor's point of view, which is something I have not looked into before.

Here are some changes I've been working on:

1. Redesigned and rebuilt the entire site from scratch. Not one line of HTML, ASP, or stored procedure code is from the old site. There will be a fresh new look that will hopefully be easier for you to navigate, and the system will make it easier for me to plug new features into.
2. I've reorganized the database. For example, departments are now associated with classes instead of professors - since a professor might teach classes in different departments, but classes typically don't change departments. All 34,000 reviews are still there.
3. Reviews can be "Flagged for Removal." Anybody can flag a review, but only volunteers and I will have the ability to permanently delete them. When a review is flagged, you will see the grade and the flag, but not the content unless it is unflagged.
4. When a Flagged Review is removed, it is considered Banned from the system. If a user has too many Banned reviews, that user risks being banned from using TeacherReviews.
5. Professors who ask not to be reviewed will still have their names in the system and it will still accept new reviews for them in case they change their mind. Their reason for not wanting to be on the site will replace their reviews.

Helping out:

• Contact your editors: TeacherReviews can make a great story for your school or local paper. I've been interviewed twice this week from different papers. Who's next?
• Create Fliers: Schools always have players for posting flyers. Save those fliers because I'm also going to create a Flier Exchange to share your fliers with others.

Finally - once again, thank you everybody who wrote in. As of right now (~4am), my blog entry "What Happened to TeacherReviews?" has just under 200 comments. I've received over 100 emails, and I think I managed to reply to every single one of them. If you didn't get a reply it might have been eaten by my spam filter.

So... Save your TeacherReviews.com bookmarks. The new site is coming soon.

UPDATE (Feb 10, 2004): I had a PayPal donation link but I decided to remove it because I do not want to be soliciting donations from students. I have a full time job that pays my bills and I don't want students who have a hard enough time paying for college to be concerned about finding money to give me.

TeacherReviews.com is free site I run for students which lets students share opinions of professors with other students. I have been pressured to shut it down. I'm not sure if it will be down forever or just a short amount of time until some changes are made. Please read on to find out why and what I am going to do about it.

Yesterday and tonight I talked with a professor who was extremely upset with what written about him on TeacherReviews. He had several inappropriate reviews that made unfounded accusations and inappropriate untruthful remarks such as calling him "Bipolar Paranoid Schitzophrenic." These reviews should not have been on the site.

I immediately deleted this professor's reviews, as I always do those rare times that a professor complains. He still threatened to sue - and even threatened to get the involvement of the teacher's union American Federation of Teachers. A lawsuit is not something I have the time or money to be involved in, no matter how confident I am that the courts would side in the favor of free speech and the site.

This would be the first lawsuit against TeacherReviews, however TeacherReview, the precursor site to TeacherReviews had one lawsuit against in about four years ago. TeacherReview had a "no review is ever deleted" policy. The ACLU helped defend TeacherReview, and TeacherReview achieved a victory - the two professors involved settled just days before the San Francisco Superior Court hearing .

The purpose of Teacher Reviews has always been to help students find the best professors to take, however the quality and reliability of TeacherReviews has been diminished by the few users who have used the site to write insults, accusations, remarks that can be considered slanderous.

As I find about about these reviews, I always delete them. They no have merit, are not helpful to anyone, and are obviously the product of a bored student who just wants to harm the reputation of a professor. That is not the purpose of TeacherReviews.

There are over 36,000 reviews on the site - far too many for me to read and evaluate. Because of this, and the threat of lawsuit, I have elected to take down TeacherReviews.com for now - at least until I can make some needed changes to how the site works.

Here are some of the changes I hope to put in place:

• Instant review removal. As a rule, I have always removed reviews upon a professor's request. Today the system is manual and it is not obvious enough how it works. The new system will have a link for removing reviews next to every review. Anybody will be able to instantly remove inappropriate reviews. Some friends and I will evaluate these removed reviews.
• Easy professor removal. I believe professors should have the right to make their reviews be private. A professor will have the ability to hide all reviews from public view. Reviews posted will be emailed to that professor, but not shared with the rest of the world. The number of reviews and possibility other information will remain on the site.
• Hide Reviews from Google. One of the complaints I got from a the professor was that if you searched Google for his name, his reviews would show up pretty high in the list of found items. Normally this is a good thing, but if the reviews are inappropriate, then it is not approbate for the to be showing up in Google.
• Email notification of New Reviews. Professors should not have to regularly visit TeacherReviews to see if they have new reviews posted. This feature will give them the option of receiving email when new reviews are posted. Students will be able to use this feature as well. New reviews will also be available via RSS.
• Date-separated reviews. Today reviews that are two years old and older are listed along side of recent reviews. Since people change, I believe that these older reviews need to be identified as older reviews, and be put on a separate page.

These features I'm not sure about:

• Response from Professor. I don't know how I can verify that somebody is really the professor before I let them post a response on the web site.
• Non-Anonymous Reviews. This would remove me from lawsuits, but I don't know if students would be comfortable posting truthful reviews.

I have never made any money from TeacherReviews. All costs related to the site have come out of my own pocket. If there ever is a lawsuit, the costs to defend the site will also come out of my own pocket. Hopefully it will never come to that.

TeacherReviews has always been a part-time hobby for me. Because of the part-time nature it might take some time to add the new features I have proposed.

Thank you for your patience and understanding, and I appreciate any comments you have, especially about the situation and my proposed new features for the site.

- Dylan Greene

(Please leave comments here or email SaveTR@TeacherReviews.com )

UPDATES:
(Feb 10): This has made Slashdot!
(Feb 10): I've posted an update to the situation: "Exhausted and sick, but I have good news!"
(Feb 11) Followup to the update: "Welcome Slashdot Readers..."

I've moved both TeacherReviews.com and Messageboard.com to the new server and they are both back online now. If you don't see them yet, wait a couple more hours and they'll return (I had to change the IP address which can take some time).

I must give thanks to the many TeacherReviews users that have contacted me over theweek asking to keep the site online - especially a Sarah from SFSU who also helped test the new site. An especially huge thanks goes to Timothy Macrina, self-taught expert in all things online, for his help and generosity in providing server space, software, and bandwidth.

Next: to move this site (DylanGreene.com). Stay tuned!

I have the backup CD of everything TeacherReviews in my hand and I'll be uploading it to the new system shortly. It's then going to take me some time to reconfigurethe sitefor this new system and figure out how MX records and the such so thatit can receive email.

I've taken down TeacherReviews.com for a short while until I can find some new hosting for it. If you're able to provide free Windows 2000/XP hosting, let me know.

Update Feb 26: I've found hosting! Thanks Tim! More information coming soon, and the site will still take a couple days to move over.