News and Announcements

SMS Option for Top Hat Temporarily Unavailable

Posted: 2023-09-05 08:34:49   Expiration: 2023-09-07 15:10:35

Disclaimer: This news item was originally posted on 2023-09-05 08:34:49. Its content may no longer be timely or accurate.

Top Hat’s SMS text message submission functionality is temporarily unavailable to students with US phone numbers. This is due to a delay in registration of the phone numbers we use to send SMS feedback to students. Of all the submissions that Top Hat receives, only 0.1% come from SMS. Nonetheless, we know that disruption to any part of our service has an impact on students and we apologize for this disruption.

SMS submission temporarily unavailable in Top Hat
During the time when SMS submissions are not available in Top Hat: 
  • Presented questions in the US will show “SMS Text Message Submissions are Currently Unavailable.”
  • The Student Registration flow will temporarily exclude mobile phone number collection because we will not be able to send SMS messages to verify phone numbers.
  • In Student Account Settings, the Phone Number & SMS tab will display the message, "Top Hat is experiencing an issue with our SMS service provider, which is preventing us from linking any US phone number to your account at this time. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please check back here in the future to add or change your phone number."
Students can expect to see these changes in Top Hat early in the week of September 4.
We recommend that students either use the Top Hat mobile app or a desktop web browser while SMS submissions are unavailable. These are the most frequently used methods of response submission and work as expected.
When the service resumes: 
  • The normal message “Use Top Hat or text [number] + your response to [phone number]” will appear on presented questions.
  • Students will be able to add or change their phone number in Account Settings > Phone Number & SMS.
This disruption does not affect Canada or any other region, where SMS submission in Top Hat is working as expected. 
If you have any questions, please respond to this email or contact support@tophat.com

-- Learn@UW-Madison: James McKay