1. Why we're migrating

In its current form, The Critical Review website was first launched in 2018 and has been 100% managed and run by students ever since. For the past 6 years, the Critical Review has succeeded in its goal of providing comprehensive reviews for hundreds of undergraduate courses every semester.

Recently, however, we have been receiving more and more bug reports, from poor search results to incorrect course and professor ratings. Unfortunately, these bugs have grown increasingly difficult to fix — due to an old codebase and infrastructure (fun fact: the site is built off of a past student's CS32 project) as well as inconsistent data storage formats, we determined that the only feasible course of action was to rebuild the Critical Review from the ground up.

So over the past year and a half, our team has worked incredibly hard to migrate the Critical Review to more modern technologies, eventually resulting in the new website you're now looking at!

(NOTE: the current .vercel.app URL is temporary — we are currently working with Brown's IT department to finalize some details, after which the site will live on the more familiar .org URL. But until then, this URL is a workaround so students will be able to access all of our most recent and up-to-date course reviews.)

2. What this means for you

For the most part, the Critical Review should look very familiar! We wanted to preserve the look and feel of the original website as much as possible. With that said, you can expect to see a few improvements, such as:

1. Refined search bar functionality
2. Improved user experience for mobile devices
3. More extensive support for discovering new courses
4. More features to come in the future!

But as is the case with all new software, it's probably imperfect, and some of you may hate the new site. That's okay! Please let us know of any feedback you may have, and definitely let us know if you run into any bugs or unexpected behavior — we'll try our best to address all the issues surfaced to us.

And lastly, new website or not, the Critical Review has always and will always depend on your input as students. We can't write or publish reviews without you! Make sure to fill out our course surveys at the end of each semester so we can continue our role in helping the Brown community navigate the Open Curriculum.

— The Critical Review Team