440 Login Timeout: Not so SUSSED….

‘440 Login Timeout’ has become an old pal to Southampton students. An old pal everyone loves to hate, that is. SUSSED, the university’s online portal, has a reported history of being notoriously unreliable, a problem which iSolutions continually claim they are rectifying, though no change appears to have occurred as of yet.

Logging onto an email system’s main page should theoretically be painless. Yet a personal experiment proved that eight times out of ten, the website has to re-direct itself after displaying the classic ‘page unavailable’ notice.

After the initial traumatic login scenario, the expected second stage of accessing an email account is simply a case of typing a password and pressing ‘Enter’. Not at Southampton. SUSSED likes to be different, frequently forcing a second login, this time to Outlook.

Whether a flaw on iSolutions’ part or simply a procedure to provide extra security, this is a ridiculously unnecessary device. Particularly for a despairing student with five minutes to spare before a lecture and not a clue which room to go to! Combine this with the seemingly constant password change demands and SUSSED has the potential to wreak huge havoc in the lives of both students and lecturers.

The SUSSED system allegedly has a 30 minute login timeout capacity, irritating in itself, although receiving the full half an hour is nothing short of a miracle. It is extremely rare that emails are accessible for this length of time, with accounts being automatically logged out after only ten minutes; not even enough time to write a lengthy email of complaint!

One student commented “we need a bigger university data centre with more powerful servers to restore the 30 minutes timeout. The longest I’ve ever had is fifteen minutes, in three years….it’s a joke.”

"Down for scheduled maintenance. You know when I'd choose for this? A couple of weeks before exams and in the middle of a lot of people's dissertation hand in week." - An angry facebook user.

A Facebook group has been full of comments such as this for as long as four years, with continual reports of problems.

Lack of storage space, an ineffective junk mail system, incompatibility with programmes such as Firefox and even the unbelievable ‘ERROR : There are too many users logged in right now’ are all frequently reported issues.

The system does occasionally provide an automatic defence of sorts however, in the form of the polite declaration: “You may try again”. If this doesn’t bring immediate relief to an over-worked, highly strung student, I don’t know what will.