October 03, 2019
Underwhelming and time consuming
We held a conference in Valladolid (Spain) this year, and we organised it with Dryfta as an all digital, paper-free conference. We needed everything a conference typically has, paper reviews, registration, payments, website, program schedules, certificates, email notifications, and things of the sort, electronically. Dryfta was quite complete as a platform and was very promising.
- It has a lot of functionalities (website and administration) all included in the same platform. If it worked properly, it allows you to organise a conference paper-free.
- Help desk responds quite quickly
- They consider making improvements when asked for.
- It’s not too expensive.
- Multilingual issues. Although it is advertised as multilingual, it didn’t really work as such. The many issues that popped up throughout the conference preparation were fixed little by little at a cost in time, from help desk emails and to struggles with the unfriendly UX.
- Admin pages reloaded every time you clicked on a button (their developers seem to ignore Ajax technologies). It was time-consuming and required constant page searches.
- Inflexibility in many of the supposed functionalities it offers.
- Certificates were not modifiable nor custom when we had to send them (it was solved months after the conference finished when we were surprisingly contacted by the help desk).
- Problems with the size of images to be displayed on the site, very small fonts and limited options to display content. We had to hire a professional developer in order to get a graphically consistent and presentable website.
- Very poor mobile version. Too big margins, unreadable text, endless text blocks and lists, distorted pictures, etc.
- Issues with the ordering of the authors’ names for different proposals (authorship being so important in research).
- Fixed, inflexible fields in the contact sheets, speakers info, and so on.
- Special character issues (due to Latin characters and other types used in linguistic research).
- Not being able to include links in the HTML editor due to Dryfta's inadvertent decisions to block them.
- Only one Superadmin user allowed to access the full functionalities of the platform, so we had to share it (consequently not knowing who did each action).
- Problems with the generation of reports and the high complexity of their interface.
- Some issues on the mandatory anonymity. The double-blind review process not fully respected due to unclear user info and options, with other issues coming up on the go such as unwanted info in automated notifications and messages in the Welcome dashboard.
- Not being able to use the other payment methods on the platform because they were incompatible with the conference country.
- Missing information and time wasted when creating events for sessions with info that already existed in the server that randomly failed to be selected. These issues were reported even with video proofs (help desk didn’t believe us), and were never solved. We had to repeat the same processes again and again, never knowing what was going on
