Using Moodle v2.9.1, Turnitin plugin v2015040110 integrated in the Assignment module.
All assignment submissions are stuck at 'Pending'.
The example in the screenshot has been stuck for a week. There is nothing clickable to take a teacher to the Turnitin page for that submission. Assignment is set to 'Generate reports immediately (resubmissions allowed)'.
Hi Josh, have you had any luck in figuring this one out? I'm experiencing the same problem in Moodle v2.6.11 with the same plugin.
No. Same problem still.
Hi John,
Thanks for the detailed reply! After turning on diagnostics and debugging, there were still no errors in the logs. I've gone back on this morning (just to double check before sending an a support ticket) and it would appear that the papers in question have been pushed through and have an originality report/grademark options available within Moodle now. I'm not sure what the problem was in the end, but it seems to be resolved for us at the moment.
all the best,
Todd
Was this issue sorted out. We have the same challenge. I have tried all possibilities of restoration of turnitin on my moodle site as mentioned in this forum to no positive success.
Hi Dennis, we haven't released a fix yet but are working on it. As I said, most of the problems we're seeing are because of errors with creating/editing the assignment and often they tend to assignments that are quite old so have been stuck in the cron for some time.
Can you run your cron and message me with your Activity and API logs and I'll take a look to see if I can spot the problem?
I did run my cron and it was fixed it. I identified part of the submissions that brought about the issue and deleted them as well.
Thanks
Good to hear Dennis, I'm glad it's fixed.
Hi,
This is a problem we have been suffering from since September 2015. We have files stuck in a queue and they seem to be causing problems for every other submission to the turnitin server from Moodle (2.7). We have logged this as problem but the support hasn't been satisfactory up to this point (helpdesk case #00468946). The latest support message we received suggested that there is no longer a problem. This is clearly not true as our students cannot upload assignments either from the direct integration or from the plagiarism plugin for Moodle assignments (all assignments are stuck as "pending"). All of our turn it in plugins are fully up to date.
Basically, I have been able to identify that there are errors showing up in various tables having run reports from:
events_handlers (7 lines returned all relating to turn it in)
events_queue_handlers (1998 lines returned, 3 specifically display turn it in error messages)
events_queue returns 1998 records
turnitin_events_queue returns 1998 events/records
event_queue_errors returns 3 errors all relating to turn it in each with a different status (537, 450, 60)
CSV files for these reports are too large to upload here but can be accessed from this dropbox link:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/kjjmjw8gjzluntj/AAA9VzU6L1cK-GeFGuN8E47ba?dl=0
Please can anybody help by outlining the process to delete the "stuck items" and get the queue moving again? Is it a case of deleting the offending records from the relevant moodle tables? I can see that one of the errors relates to a specific Moodle user. I get the feeing though that clearing this error will then just throw up more errors stuck further down the queue. A quick look in the API control panel of files reveals that many files from one particular course were rejected some time ago due to file size restrictions and names that contained too many characters. I get the feeling that there are many more of these to come after current problem which is holding up the cron job. The priority right now is to get Turn it in working again as soon as possible even if that means losing the work/submissions that are currently in the queue. This has been going on since September therefore a college of 2000 students have been unable to use the (paid for) service for a very long time. All work stuck in the queue is backed up elsewhere by students so starting again from scratch would be fine. A lot of deadlines have been missed and a lot of stress has been caused for both staff and students because of this.
To be clear - at this stage we are so frustrated by this issue that we are willing to just delete everything and start again! If we do this, will we be able to sync existing assignments back from the turn it in server? Again to make this point very clear - no user has been able to submit work successfully this academic year via the plagiarism plugin. The direct integration was working up until November when we installed updates to the plugins (via the plugin notifications page). After updates in November it was no longer possible for students to upload work at all from any assignment type.
The API connection to submit.ac.uk is working fine.
Old assignments can still be viewed via moodle by Teachers and it is still possible to create new assignments. It's just not possible for Moodle to pass these submissions on to turnitin because of what seems like events queue problems.
Hopefully somebody can provide some advice. Any help would be very welcome.
Thanks
Mike Grainger
Learning Technology Co-ordinator
Which version of the plugin are you using (from the plugins overview page).
Hi Marcus,
Turnitin Assignment Type 2016011101
Turnitin plagiarism plugin 2016011101
Both up to date as far as I know.
Mike
Thanks John,
I've added a few more files into the dropbox link for you to have a look at. Hopefully they are the ones you requested. Let me know if you need any more.
I think that the submission currently stuck in the queue is from a course which had its name changed around about the same time that turnitin stopped working. From what I have read earlier in this thread I'm starting to wonder if this upset the sync between Moodle classes and those on the Turnitin server?? The course probably even has a different course ID related to LDAP enrolments compared to the previous academic year (I didn't make this change - I've only just discovered it and I'm not so happy about it tbh!).
I've also noticed that a lot of our teachers are re-using old assignments from previous years by simply changing the opening and closing dates (and maybe some other details). Could this have caused problems? Is it considered better practice to use a turnitin assignment only once?
Right now we'd be happy just to clear all items stuck in the queue and start again. I'm concerned that clearing the immediate stuck item will just uncover more errors that will make it stick again (unless updates to the plugin will override this even for submissions submitted before we updated to the latest version of the plugin).
Thanks for your help
Mike
Hi Mike,
The cron output has:
We've seen this error with a few people. Before passing the file to Turnitin the plugin was trying to find the mime type using mime_content_type() but as this has been deprecated we changed it to use the finfo() functions instead. These are enabled by default on PHP 5.3+ - see http://uk1.php.net/manual/en/fileinfo.installation.php - but this doesn't seem to be the case with windows.
Does enabling that extension fix your problem?
Regards
John
Hi John,
Initially that did work and we have been able to reduce the items in the queue to around 800 but it has stopped again. I've attached the error log from the cron job to this post as a txt file.
There looks to be a problem with the file that is trying to be submitted as it can't be read. Can you find out the file that is first in the queue, the easiest way would be to print_r($eventdata) in the event handler. It might be ok just to remove that event from the queue but if it's possible to forward it on I'd be interested to see if we could replicate the problem here.
Hi John,
We were sent some instructions by Tayler (which weren't exactly clear) and referred to a png file attachment (which wasn't attached). Following these instructions to the best of our abilities got us to the point where the turnitin queue started to move but then stopped again (as detailed above). Our big issue right now is that Moodle is pretty much falling apart today since yesterday's changes. Students can't upload assignments (turnitin plagiarism plugin not enable for those assignments although it may have been enabled in the past) and many courses cannot update or change topic titles. Both return a 500 server error in the browser:
The website encountered an error while retrieving http://moo.priestley.ac.uk/course/editsection.php. It may be down for maintenance or configured incorrectly.
Any ideas? Has this got anything to do with the php.ini file? We may need some more detailed instructions to be able to get our turnitin problems fixed (and beyond if they are related). Your help so far on this forum has been much appreciated John which is more than I can say for the support we have received from our helpdesk ticket which has been dismal at best.
Thanks
Mike
It's possibly related but you'd need to up your CFG debugging level so an error with some more detail is output to screen. That would then point directly at the problem. See: https://docs.moodle.org/29/en/Debugging#In_config.php.
If you let me know that, I'll help if I can.
Dear Michael,
Did you manage to figure this problem?
"Both return a 500 server error in the browser: The website encountered an error while retrieving http://moo.priestley.ac.uk/course/editsection.php. It may be down for maintenance or configured incorrectly. "
We experienced exactly the same thing when we tried to activate the Plagiarism plugin on our production site:
https://moodle.org/plugins/plagiarism_turnitin
Version : 20150406, Moodle 2.8.6+, 3 clusters.
The plugin works on our test site without problems, and also the "normal" Turnitin Two" assignment is all right on both the production and test sites.
But after we activated this on the production site, the error messages started to pop up from time to time, and after we disabled the plugin they stopped immediately. What we found is that the file system on our production site had some problems and sent error messages like:
PHP Warning: mkdir(): No such file or directory in ............................moodle-2.8.6+/lib/setuplib.php
Now we repaired the file system, and will give an other try to the plugin when the classes are not that busy.
Best regards,
Gabor
