Stumped by Messenger Pop-up

Stumped by Messenger Pop-up

por Fernando Oliveira -
Número de respuestas: 22
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When our Moodle site loads, it immediately launches the messenger pop-up window (www.moodlesite.com/message/index.php) (but since user isn’t logged in, it immediately reverts to the login screen... this is normal behaviour). After user logs in, the messenger page is again loaded except it shows full screen. The only way to side-step this screen and get into the site is to manually edit the URL by removing “/message/index.php”.

 Why is the messenger loading at startup?

Tried switching themes, replacing files, disabling blocks (and shaking the screen smile) but no joy. The only remedy I can find is to disable the messaging system in admin/security/site policies, which doesn’t really do us any good since we need to use this feature.

I’m stumped. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Fernando

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En respuesta a Fernando Oliveira

Re: Stumped by Messenger Pop-up

por Usuario eliminado -
Fernando, we're getting this too and are equally stumped. Can you tell me WHERE you manually edited the URL? If you can at least we can implement that. After upgrading our teachers are bewildered, our students can no longer register (the registration button has gone away!) and other weirdness is manifesting.

I'm putting up another post about that but meanwhile, where have you done this manual editing of the URL? At least that would be a good part-time hack until we figure out the real thing.

Thanks!
Maryam
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Re: Stumped by Messenger Pop-up

por Fernando Oliveira -
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Hi Maryam,

You have to manually edit the URL in the browser itself. So, when your site loads www.moodlesite.com/message/index.php , delete the /message/index.php part and press enter. Alternatively, and probably a better idea as far as getting your site back online, you can disable the messaging function by going to admin/security/site policies (in the site admin block) - this should prevent the pop-up until we can figure out what the problem is.

Fernando

PS. I suspect the problem is related to the upgrade, since we recently upgraded as well.
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En respuesta a Fernando Oliveira

Re: Stumped by Messenger Pop-up

por Lewis Carr -
It sounds to me like you have a message which is unread, hence the popup appears.
But if the user is blocked then you will not see the message.

My advice would be to go into the mySQL database and look at the mdl_message table.
This table lists all the messages that have not been read. You could select and delete them all, this would stop the popup problem, but be warned, you may delete a message that someone has geniunely sent and the user has not read yet.

Always back up your database first before doing direct database changes!
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En respuesta a Lewis Carr

Re: Stumped by Messenger Pop-up

por Usuario eliminado -
Hi Lewis,
As this was a new build upgrade and nothing was yet imported/restored, there were no messages in the entire system, which is why it was so very weird!

We have disabled the messaging system entirely which is sub-optimal as it prevents one of the very features students value and ask for. To date there are no messages in the system at all.

Bottom line is we don't want the popup EVER to occur, and for students to manually check their mail. In the last version, the "you have messages" icon would appear in the messages block. We want it this way again.

Any other thoughts on this?? Anybody?? We're desperate, as the messaging system is one of the ways we preserve our student and faculty anonymity while allowing valued communication to take place.

Thanks!
Maryam
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Re: Stumped by Messenger Pop-up

por E. L. Cooper -
I have been using a teacher contact form in every week for a while to create an easily preserved audit trail for teacher/student communication. It is really just an online text assignment with unlimited attempts and teacher response is made in the 'assignment'
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Re: Stumped by Messenger Pop-up

por Lewis Carr -

Hi Maryam,

Users can disable message checking from their message settings tab.  However, I presume you want to do this for all users.  The only way I can think to do this is to modify the core code and remove/change the code that initiates the popup.

It would be better to find what is causing the popup to trigger if the message table is empty, it could be a bug in your build. 

I'm not sure exactly where the message check trigger is but I'll have a look, but do bear in mind that a core code hack like this will be reverted when you upgrade Moodle in the future.

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Re: Stumped by Messenger Pop-up

por Usuario eliminado -
Hey Lewis, thanks for this but none of us are code warriors and I don't want to monkey around in the deep core. Shivers! It occurs that it's a bug not a feature. It's driving us nuts. What's even nuttier is how posting to the forum in a class redirects the user to the front page of the moodle, rather than their post in the forum. It's confusing the hell out of my unsavvy users.

Any thoughts on that? Geez, I'd hate to have to upgrade in the middle of term, but looks like it may be necessary...

Thanks,
Maryam
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Re: Stumped by Messenger Pop-up

por Lewis Carr -
Then i think an upgrade is your only real solution. It's fairly painless, and if you back it up first then you can always revert.
If the upgrade goes smoothly you may only have about 20 minutes down time if that.
An upgrade during term is always worrying but if this is essential for you then its worth the bit of down time. Maybe an early Monday morning task...
Good luck.

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Re: Stumped by Messenger Pop-up

por Yvonne van Lingen -
I've been struggling with this message popup as well.

I found the solution here: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=97913

In file lib/weblib.php, look for:

if (!empty($CFG->messaging)) {
$output .= message_popup_window();
}

and change to

if (!empty($CFG->messaging)) {
//$output .= message_popup_window();
 }

Hope this helps!

Regards

Yvonne

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En respuesta a Yvonne van Lingen

Re: Stumped by Messenger Pop-up

por Usuario eliminado -
OMG Yvonne - THANK YOU!!! I had searched under all the terms I could think of and didn't surface this. How wonderful, our ecampus is now fixed. Hurray!!

warmest regards,
Maryam
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Re: Stumped by Messenger Pop-up

por Martin F -
This solution would certainly help Chrome users. When you use the Chrome browser, the message pop-up always seem to appear.
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Re: Stumped by Messenger Pop-up

por Anthony Borrow -
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This bug was fixed a while ago - in fact, I believe I worked on the patch for it. In any case, knowing which version is important. Upgrading should fix it smoothly so that the user does not have to deal with worrying about making changes directly to the database. Peace - Anthony
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Re: Stumped by Messenger Pop-up

por Fernando Oliveira -
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Hello Anthony,

Can you provide more info on the bug-fix that you worked on? I'm still trying to get to bottom of this.

Here's a short screencast that shows the problem on our site: http://screencast.com/t/GL1jw8KD.

Notice that the messenger window opens full-screen once the user logs in and there's no way to get back to the site without modifying the URL. Notice also that the messenger window pops up again - this time as an actual pop-up window - once the user logs out.

Thanks,

Fernando

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Re: Stumped by Messenger Pop-up

por Anthony Borrow -
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Fernando - Your version of Moodle is certainly up to date. It should have been resolved when you upgraded. Do you have access to phpMyAdmin and are you comfortable using that tool to check out some things in the database? If so, let's arrange a time when we can go through things over an IM session. Peace - Anthony
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Re: Stumped by Messenger Pop-up

por Anthony Borrow -
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Fernando - Look at the behavior you reported, it looks like you do not have popups enabled on your browser. Normally the message screen would open up in a popup so that also seems to be contributing to your experience. Could you check your popup settings for that particular browser or try using a different browser to test the behavior. Peace - Anthony
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Re: Stumped by Messenger Pop-up

por E. L. Cooper -
It may actually be a 3rd party tool bar popup blocker that is the culpret. I tracked it down to the google popup blocker a couple of days ago for a student.
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En respuesta a E. L. Cooper

Re: Stumped by Messenger Pop-up

por Anthony Borrow -
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Do not hesitate to let me know how I can be of help in tracking down the messenger pop-up mystery. Peace - Anthony
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Re: Stumped by Messenger Pop-up

por Fernando Oliveira -
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Hi Anthony and E.L.,

Pretty sure it's not a pop-up blocker issue. The problem is the same in IE and FF and the URL for my Moodle site is shown as allowed in the "exceptions" pop-up list.

This problem exists on two of our Moodle sites, both of which were recently upgraded from 1.8 to 1.9. Actually, the sites are fresh installs; the courses were copied over via backup/restore method. Not sure if this helps.

At this point, I'm thinking it might be best to delete all messages from the database since this feature hasn't enabled yet anyway. I assume this would solve the problem, though it wouldn't help detemine if it's bug-related.

Fernando

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Re: Stumped by Messenger Pop-up

por Anthony Borrow -
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Just to follow up what Fernando and I found. The issue had to do bogus records in Fernando's mdl_message table where the usertoid was 0. I have created MDL-20526 to look at better avoiding the behavior that Fernando was experiencing. Essentially I moved all the records that had a usertoid of 0 into a backup table (so as not to lose any data) and then removed them from the mdl_message table. Once we did that his site began functioning properly again. I am uncertain as to the cause of the bogus data but if anyone is able to reproduce it just let me know and we will try to get to the bottom of it. My guess would be that it was some type of site migration or backup/restore gone bad. Peace - Anthony

p.s. - Because MDL-20526 has the slight but unlikely possibility of being a security issue (I've asked Petr to look and comment) the issue will not initially be publicly visible; however, once we confirm that it is not a security issue we can make it visible.

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Re: Stumped by Messenger Pop-up

por Fernando Oliveira -
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Here's a little more context that might help narrow down the cause:

The site in question was a fresh install of Moodle 1.95. Courses and users were copied over to this new site (using course back-up and restore) from our old Moodle 1.85 site. The database itself was never edited manually prior to this fix.

Thanks again for your help, Anthony.

Best,
Fernando


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Re: Stumped by Messenger Pop-up

por Anthony Borrow -
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Fernando - My pleasure. I commented in the tracker that it would be good if we could play with recreating the situation that led to the problem. I would like to ensure that others not run into a similar situation. If you could, please follow up in the tracker and we will see what we can do to track things down. Peace - Anthony
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