Students attempting to register for classes last Wednesday found themselves unable to do so, as StudentLink’s WebReg system was beleaguered on the first day of undergraduate registration for winter quarter.

Due to the discontinuation of the TeSS telephone registration system this quarter, WebReg, an Internet tool for adding and dropping classes, was left as students’ only means to register for classes at UCSD aside from walking into the Registrar’s office.

Students primarily affected by the irregularity in service were athletes, Regents scholars and National Merit scholars who have the privilege of first-day registration.

The first sign of trouble came around 8:30 a.m., when athletes with the earliest registration times found the system inoperable.

“”I ran back from water polo practice at 8:15 a.m. to register and I had no problems,”” Muir freshman Laura Holshouser said, a goaltender for the women’s water polo team. “”But, some of the girls who got back at 8:30 a.m. found out they couldn’t register.””

Holshouser was the one of few without problems during the day.

As registration opened to Regents and National Merit Scholars beginning at 10 a.m., they too found the system inoperably slow as they attempted to register for classes. WebReg allowed students to access the add/drop screen for winter quarter, but would return errors, stating an inability to connect to the student database as soon as students attempted to add a section.

However, many students found a simple solution to their woes by walking to the Registrar’s office.

“”I first tried to register at about 10 a.m.,”” Revelle freshman Nick Butko said. “”Then, I called the Registrar’s, and they said, ‘It’s down, they’re fixing it. Come here and register.’ So I went there and registered. It was easy — it took about two minutes per person with two windows open, and there were only about five people there.””

Registrar’s office staff reported more traffic than Butko witnessed. A staff member who asked not to be named said that on Nov. 1, “”traffic [there] was very heavy as a result of StudentLink being down.””

Later that evening, StudentLink was completely shut down and a notice was posted that stated: “”We are currently experiencing technical difficulties.””

By late that night, the system was apparently working again.

Marty Backer of Administrative Computing and Telecommunica-tion tried to allay campus concerns about the technical difficulties.

“”We have not solved the problem at this time,”” Backer said. “”But can assure you and all students that it is not related to the volume of students beginning their registration process for winter quarter.””

There were difficulties the next day as WebReg posted a message asking students to retry their request, should they run into any trouble. However, the system was once again slow and barely operable.

“”We had to keep trying for, like, an hour, repeating the same thing over and over,”” Muir freshman Cori Atkinson said, who admitted that she was able to register on her second try.

While it would be easy to correlate the first-day failure of StudentLink to the discontinuation of TeSS, this apparently was not the case.

“”[Nov. 1] was not an unusual volume for student WebReg,”” Backer stated.

Many students expressed support for WebReg over TeSS regardless of system irregularities.

“”I would actually prefer the Internet, even if it is slower, because there’s a weekly planner to make sure you do nothing stupid,”” Atkinson said.