This is a round-up of some stray updates that have gone unmentioned over the last couple of months.
Making notes about students
You can now write notes about students, the same way you do for listings. If it's your job to approve future students, you'll probably find this useful—whenever there's some hold-up with an approval, you can make a note and have it show up next to the student's name in the approval list.
Exporting student data
Listings with photos rank higher in search results
It's so obvious it's almost not worth saying: photos reveal things about a property that can't be conveyed through words alone. They're so important that, for a while, I think we even considered making them a requirement for new listings. We stopped short of that in favour of rewarding providers who add photos of their listings—their listings will show above non-photographed listings. Just remember though, there are other things that affect rankings, like tags, star ratings and (depending on the search order) recency and distance from campus.
It's so obvious it's almost not worth saying: photos reveal things about a property that can't be conveyed through words alone. They're so important that, for a while, I think we even considered making them a requirement for new listings. We stopped short of that in favour of rewarding providers who add photos of their listings—their listings will show above non-photographed listings. Just remember though, there are other things that affect rankings, like tags, star ratings and (depending on the search order) recency and distance from campus.
Password assistance
When you click the “Forget your password” link, you get a more helpful message if you try to click the reset link more than once. We also ask people to confirm their new password to catch typos. And we've allowed the < and > symbols in passwords, which were previously preventing some students from signing in.
Closed listings showing up on Google
After listings close, we now ask Google (and other search engines) to forget about them and stop showing them in search results. Providers sometimes include private information about themselves in their listings, and then get surprised later when it shows up in Google searches. While we recommend that you remove any private details if you notice them, if any slip through they won't stick around in Google for too long.