Length of posts a problem for some students

Length of posts a problem for some students

by Sam McNeill -
Number of replies: 5

Hi All,

I've searched via google and manually through the forum but can not find any solutions to this problem. We seem to be having random students (and some teachers) saying they can not post to forums over a certain number of characters. They are getting a range of errors depending on their browser type:

 

 

There are two ways it seems to be happening:

1) When students copy/paste text into the forum

2) When manually typing and it seems to "exceed" a limit.

I have dropped the re-edit time down to 5mins, but as I understand the documentation this does not affect the original post composition time.

I've increased the max_execution_time from 30 to 300 seconds and the max_input_time from 300 to 600 seconds. I don't think this should affect what is going on here however.

As it stands students are having to post comments in two separate posts now which is less than ideal.

Any suggestions greatly appreciated.

SYSTEM:

Moodle 2.2.2

OS = Ubuntu 12.04 standard install (PHP 5.3.1, mySQL 5.5.2)

Cheers

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In reply to Sam McNeill

Re: Length of posts a problem for some students

by Derek Chirnside -

You are right Sam, this question (which I faced with the old editor, way back, of what is the maximum size of text input) is not in any of the docs.

In the tiny MCE forums they have been obsessed with discussing the ways to set the a maximum limit.  http://www.tinymce.com/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=67052#p67052  No help there.

There is another forum here in Moodle.org specifically on the editor: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?id=1035

I presume you have done a few basics: checked that is is not a "copy from Word" problem, and checked that if you choose the default install values the problem does not go away.

Good luck.

-Derek

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In reply to Derek Chirnside

Re: Length of posts a problem for some students

by Itamar Tzadok -

Maximum size of the forum post text (mysql) is 65535 characters or less if you use multibyte characters. The copy from Word is often a problem because the visible text may be short but the MS html garbage makes it exceed the limit. hth smile

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In reply to Itamar Tzadok

Re: Length of posts a problem for some students

by Sam McNeill -

Thanks for the reples- we are really clutching at straws here!!

THe posts in question are getting nowhere near that limit at all - here is a copy of one example of text:

"You are the ruler of a medieval empire and you are about to have a celebration tomorrow. The celebration is the most important party you have ever hosted. You've got 1000 bottles of wine you were planning to open for the celebration, but you find out that one of them is poisoned.

The poison exhibits no symptoms until death. Death occurs within ten to twenty hours after consuming even the tiniest amount of poison.

You have over a thousand slaves at your disposal and just under 24 hours to determine which single bottle is poisoned.

You have a handful of prisoners about to be executed, and it would mar your celebration to have anyone else killed.

What is the smallest number of prisoners you must have to drink from the bottles to be absolutely sure to find the poisoned bottle within 24 hours?"


What is really, really strange is that I could post this to the forum without any problems but the teacher in question could not.

I think this just over 800 characters - not a limit, no fancy text in it. Even if the teacher copy/pasted my successful post to the forums and then tried to post it themselves it failed....

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In reply to Sam McNeill

Re: Length of posts a problem for some students

by Rick Jerz -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Testers

I wonder if you could try posting this in Moodle's experimental site at http://qa.moodle.net/.  I don't go there too often, so I am not sure how much forum posting one can do, but it might be worth a try.

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In reply to Rick Jerz

Re: Length of posts a problem for some students

by Sam McNeill -

OK it looks like we're narrowing this down to an issue with our firewall IDP features that is blocking Moodle posts and updates, believing them to be attempted "injection" attacks.

I've read http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Security:SQL_injection but given this is occurring with standard moodle modules in forums and glossaries the Dev guidelines don't really apply.

I'll look at taking this up in a different forum on Moodle (security probably) and also discussing with our firewall providers.

Thanks

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