Moodle Support

About Moodle

Get started

Instructor support

Student support

Known issues and bugs

1. Unenrolled users remain subscribed to the forums
2. Wimba and Internet Explorer
3. Daylight saving time
4. Files with special characters are not allowed
5. It is not possible to close open/in progress quiz attempts for student
6. It is not possible to search by Internet /Guest ID (x500) in the Assign Roles interface
7. Quiz results page shows Moodle admins
8. Firefox 3 and PDF files
9. Login issues: loop or IP mismatch error
10. "Funny", extra, code-looking characters
    • Word
    • Browser Highlighter
11. Invisible submissions in the Assignment activity
12. Students cannot see grades or feedback files in the Assignment activity

1. Unenrolled users remain subscribed to the forums

In some situations users who are no longer enrolled into a Moodle site remain subscribed to the forums. E.g.:

• Forum was forcing everyone to be subscribed
• Students subscribed themselves, and then were unenrolled

To double-check and change who is subscribed to an individual forum, go to a forum and click "Show/edit current forum subscribers" link in the upper right corner (You will not see the link, if you force everyone to be subscribed, therefore you will need to update forum settings first).

2. Wimba and Internet Explorer

It is not possible to add a new Wimba Activity in Internet Explorer for designers. Please use Firefox instead. Once the activity is added, you may use any browser to participate in it.

3. Daylight saving time

Moodle does not work well with daylight saving time adjustments. Therefore, every time there is a time change, you will need to double-check the due dates to make sure that they are not moved by one hour off.

• DST begins at 2 a.m. March 14, 2010
• DST begins at 2 a.m. November 7, 2010

4. Files with special characters are not allowed

Files with special characters in the titles should not be loaded into the Files area of your site. Later it will not be possible to link to those files, or even remove links to them from your Files area.

5. It is not possible to close open/in progress quiz attempts for students

When a quiz attempt is past its time limit, or when the closing date for a quiz is over, the attempt remains "open".
Usually this happens when a student click "Save without Submit" button, instead of "Submit". Then the quiz closes, so a student can not access it anymore, but the attempt will be marked as "open" (in progress).
Grade for such attempt will not show up in the gradebook, and there is no way for the instructor to manually overwrite anything in such attempt, or force/close a submission.

Solution: Re-open the quiz temporarily, and ask students to click "Save and submit for grading" button.

6. It is not possible to search by Internet /Guest ID (x500) in the Assign Roles interface

Assign Roles interface can be searched by the First/Last name and an email only. Therefore, if a user changes the default email address in the Moodle system, you will not be able to find a person by typing her x500.

7. Quiz results page shows Moodle admins

If an instructor will go to the Quiz Results page and select "Show all students" or "Show students with no attempts only", then the list will also show admins for our Moodle installation, even though they are not enrolled into the course.

8. Firefox 3 and PDF files

9. Login issues: loop or IP mismatch error

Sometimes you may get a "loop" error, which will prevent you from login to Moodle or to any other central system (e.g. http://myu.umn.edu). Also you may get the following text: IP mismatch error.

Usually this kind of "looping" happens when Internet providers  disconnect and reconnect with a different IP address.
Likewise, if the connection is on a wireless network, the connection may be hopping between routers (which would change the IP).

Possible solutions:

• Re-login from central authentication (http://umn.edu/logout) and log back in to Moodle (http://moodle.umn.edu ). However, this will help only until the IP is changed again.
• Use stable wired connection, e.g. in computer lab.
• Contact the ISP provider and see if they can provide a static IP or an IP that doesn't change often.

Best solution(!):

• If it is not possible to get a static IP, download and use the VPN client. It is free, easy to set up, and it ensures a secure and stable connection. (Once you get it installed, start the program, enter your Internet ID, and then browse the Internet as usual)
• Download: http://www.oit.umn.edu/vpn/download-vpn/index.htm

Note: if you have changed your Internet ID recently,contact moodle@umn.edu to request a matching change in your Moodle ID. Warning: Do not access Moodle until after your Moodle ID is changed; otherwise, your previous work may be lost.

10. Extra, code-looking characters

Issue 1: Users see some extra formatting characters; interface can be unresponsive

SAMPLE #1 (Word code):

<!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"Cambria Math"; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; } @font-face...

Explanation:

• It means that the user pasted directly from Word or any other proprietary application, which adds its own proprietary code.
  Please note that such code can and will break Moodle functionality by making interface unresponsive.
  • The code will be added to the text areas where the user copied/pasted from Word.
  • The code will be visible in the html-mode, and sometimes can be visible in a regular view.
  • The code will appear both at the beginning and at the end of the text in the html-mode.

Solution:

• How to avoid the issue: Copy/paste from Word into Notepad (or TextEdit on Mac). This will strip off the code. Then copy/paste into Moodle, and use Moodle editor to format text, if needed.
• How to remove the code already added:
• Option 1:
• Go to your Moodle site via Safari or Chrome browser since those browsers do not display WYSIWYG controls and provide only html view of all text entry fields. OR, go to your Moodle Profile, click Edit Settings, set "When editing text" to "Use Standard Web Forms" (you will stop seeing WYSIWYG editor and will see only the html view)
• Go back to your course site and review your labels, resources, forum descriptions by clicking Edit icons.
• You are going to see bunch of extra code added both at the beginning and at the end of the text areas. Erase the code and save changes.
• Option 2:
  • Copy/paste affected text into Notepad (or TextEdit on Mac).
  • Go to the affected resource in the html mode. Click <> icon in the text editor, or access the site in Safari or Chrome. Erase absolutely everything that you see there.
  • Copy/paste your text back from Notepad into Moodle, and then use Moodle text-editor to format text, if needed.

SAMPLE #2 (Browser Highlighter code):

<input type="hidden" id="gwProxy" />
<!--Session data--><input type="hidden" id="jsProxy" onclick="function onclick(event) { function onclick(event) { function onclick(event) { jsCall(); } } }" />

Explanation:

• User installed a plugin called "Browser Highlighter" into Firefox, and then added activities or resources to a Moodle course. The plugin would add its own code to all text entry fields that user has accessed in the editing mode (resource summaries, assignment descriptions, labels, etc)
  • The code will be added to almost every text area that the user has accessed in the editing mode. E.g. if you added a link to a website and left the Summary field blank for this resource, the code will be silently added to the Summary area anyway.
  • The code will be visible only in the html-mode.
  • The code will appear at the end of the text in the html-mode.

Solution:

• How to avoid the issue: Uninstall the plugin.
• How to remove the code already added: Note that the code will be added to almost every text area that the user has edited.
  • Go to your Moodle site via Safari or Chrome browser since those browsers do not display WYSIWYG controls and provide only html view of all text entry fields. OR, go to your Moodle Profile, click Edit Settings, set "When editing text" to "Use Standard Web Forms" (you will stop seeing WYSIWYG editor and will see only the html view)
  • Go back to your course site and review your labels, resources, forum descriptions by clicking Edit icons.
  • You are going to see bunch of extra code added at the end of the text areas. Erase the code and save changes.

Issue 2: Users see extra 'A'-s in the email digests.

Explanation: The email client (groupwise, outlook etc) can add some things, and this is pretty much out of control. For example, if the original post had double lines inserted between sentences, and you view the email later in the HTML format, you may see those A's. If you read in Plain text, then you should not have any issues.
To switch to plain text emails, go to your Moodle profile, click Edit tab, and set Email format to Plain text. (Or tell users to avoid double lines in posts, if this is a real issue).

In addition, there can be different settings for character sets. If on someones machine the < symbol will be displayed as <, on the others the same symbol will be displayed as { .

11. Invisible submissions in the Assignment activity

Some student submissions can be invisible to the instructors in the default view of the Assignment submissions page.
Students on the other hand are able to see their own submissions just fine.
The issue is extremely (!) rare in occurrence.

Cause: Most of the time it is caused by pushing the Submit button twice in a short interval.

Solution: Such submissions are visible to the instructors, if they re-sort the submissions page by any other column, e.g. by “Last Modified”.

12. Students cannot see grades or feedback files in the Assignment activity

Issue 1. If the Assignment grade column is hidden in the gradebook, then students will not see the feedback via the assignment area as well.

Solution: Unhide the assignment column in the gradebook first.

If this is not desired and you want to keep the assignment hidden in the gradebook, then you can use the following work-around:

• Create a separate category in the gradebook for such assignments
• Hide the category via the Categories and Items tab in the gradebook
• Move the assignments into that hidden category and then unhide (!) them. This trick will keep assignments hidden from a student view in the gradebook, but will allow students to see the feedback and grades directly in the assignment area

Quiz, Forum, Glossary, and Database tools are different, and students CAN see their grades from within the activity, even though the corresponding grade item is hidden in the gradebook.

Issue 2. If the instructor uploads the response file back via the assignment tool for a student to review, but does not assign a grade or does not enter text feedback in comments, then the student will not see the response file.

Solution: The instructor has to provide a grade or some written comments for the assignment.

To expedite the process of providing text comments if the issue has already occurred, the instructor can:

• Check Allow quick grading the Assignment submission area
• Put some feedback or just dots (try not to hit enter key after them) in the Comments column.
• Once done, uncheck Send notification emails (optional) and click Save all my feedback at the bottom
• Important: Change your preferences back, by  unchecking Allow Quick Grading feature, since it is not recommended for use

Directories | Contact U of M | Privacy