We have been experiencing a weird problem on occasion with a few of our students' assignment submissions showing December 31, 1969 submission date. We are using Moodle version 1.9.9. On two occasions students have claimed to have submitted assignments that didn't show up under grading. The activity logs also did not show the submission; however, when we review the Complete logs under the student's profile, we see the submission with the December 31, 1969 date. Does anyone know what might be causing this error?
Dear David,
This is a wild stab in the dark, but the date December 31, 1969 is the epoch date of Unix based systems when date variables have a value of 0. Therefore to guess, is your server loosing its connection with a time server when the submission is made and therefore php cannot get the current time and then uses '0' as the default?
Cheers,
Gareth
This is a wild stab in the dark, but the date December 31, 1969 is the epoch date of Unix based systems when date variables have a value of 0. Therefore to guess, is your server loosing its connection with a time server when the submission is made and therefore php cannot get the current time and then uses '0' as the default?
Cheers,
Gareth
Thank you for your reply Gareth. I noticed that the student was doing a little fiddling with the submission. I believe he may have been leaving the submission popup window open but then clicking the submit button after the deadline time. I wonder if that could cause the 0 time entry error. This error has ocurred for only two students out of a class of 589, so I'm leaning to the idea that it may have something to do with how they did their submissions. 