Hi,
I have a strange problem reported to me and I am not sure how to explain it ?
Some students on a workshop have received email like the one below.
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2008_CM146 ->Workshops ->Workshop Two
Your assignment 'workshop week 2' has been assessed by a Student.
The comments and grade can be seen in the Workshop Assignment ' > Workshop Two'.
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That would be fine except for the fact that the course finished last summer and has been hidden from students since. All the 'late assessments' seem to have been posted on one particular day within a 2 hour period.
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Assessment by ...
Friday, 13 February 2009, 12:04 PM
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and the late assessment links appear as '{0}' - see here
and the strangest thing is that the students that are reported to have posted these assessments have not had any activity on the moodle site since the course finished.
How can this be ?
Or if I can not figure out why it is happening is there a way to prevent emails being sent from courses which are hidden/inactive ?
thanks,
Justin
Hi all,
The same thing seems to be happening to us here in a course that is from the Fall 2009 semester. This is causing all kinds of confusion for the students, the instructor and now us at the help center. Any ideas of what may be happening would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Caryl Gordon
Hi Caryl,
I may have a suspicion what is going on here. In Workshop 1.x, whenever a submission is allocated to be reviewed by a peer (which is done automatically and nobody can control that much), a new assessment record is created in the database and its timecreated flag is set one year into the future to signalize that this assessment has not been completed yet by the peer. That is obviously very strange design. Unfortunately, Workshop 1.x code is full of such things and that is why it was rewritten completely from scratch for Moodle 2.0.
Anyway back to your problem. I think that after the year the workshop suddenly finds these assessment records and it considers them as assessed because the time created is not in the future any more. So it sends the email to the author that their submission has been assessed even though nobody even started to assess the work.
Can you please confirm that this explanation would fit your case? Can you check the dates to see if it happened one year later after the workshop?
I may have a suspicion what is going on here. In Workshop 1.x, whenever a submission is allocated to be reviewed by a peer (which is done automatically and nobody can control that much), a new assessment record is created in the database and its timecreated flag is set one year into the future to signalize that this assessment has not been completed yet by the peer. That is obviously very strange design. Unfortunately, Workshop 1.x code is full of such things and that is why it was rewritten completely from scratch for Moodle 2.0.
Anyway back to your problem. I think that after the year the workshop suddenly finds these assessment records and it considers them as assessed because the time created is not in the future any more. So it sends the email to the author that their submission has been assessed even though nobody even started to assess the work.
Can you please confirm that this explanation would fit your case? Can you check the dates to see if it happened one year later after the workshop?
Hi David,
Ok. So we are experiencing this as well and it does seem to fit the explanation. Now that we are 1 year and 3 months after opening our program this is starting to become more than slightly problematic.
Any advice how we can fool the database or block these messages - or anything other (not too effort-intensive) suggestion?
Thanks,
Heidi
Hi Heidi,
the prompt way I can see is to disable Workshop emailing completely. To do so, edit file mod/workshop/lib.php. Locate the function workshop_cron() near line 165. Then find the lines
// Find all workshop notifications that have yet to be mailed out, and mails them
$cutofftime = $timenow - $CFG->maxeditingtime;
near line 181 and add "return true;" below them so the code reads
// Find all workshop notifications that have yet to be mailed out, and mails them
$cutofftime = $timenow - $CFG->maxeditingtime;
return true;
Be ware - by this way, no emails will be sent by workshop any more - even those that would be correct submission/assessment reminders.