That phrase from "The IT crowd", (and real life) is a common and effective response to general computer problems. I'd like to get some opinions on what the top three Moodle equivalents are. here are some suggestions.
Have you tried it with a different theme?
Have you turned on debugging to see any error messages?
Have you tried restarting your server? (Ok I ran out after two, how about have you tried upgrading from 1.9)
I'm going to move this to the Lounge because I think it is a good topic for there (even though it is asking about help questions)
Probably not in the top three but I will also add "Did you try with a real student account as opposed to simply 'switching your role to student'?"
How about:
Maybe this'll turn into a Moodle Docs page... ;)
I like the file permissions one.
How about, have you tried a different browser?
A less common but potentially useful one is "what happens when you disable javascript"
.... Have you performed a 'Purge all caches'...
But seriously, is there something to be considered about all of this? Is it not an indicator that things need to improve such that the questions are not needed to be asked in the first place?
Teachnology (An accidental typo) is constantly evolving and we are all still learning what an LMS is and what it can be. So at the moment it might be that these sort of questions are asked, but perhaps what really matters is that the support is given from the community, that people have other people to turn two when they have problems.
There is of course the BFG of all questions:
"Why would you want to do that?"
Used properly (as in, as an answer to every fault report) you can delay dealing with the issue for weeks!
Here's another one: "Are you sure you're trying to log in to the right Moodle site?"
BTW, I always enable login with email. How many people do you know who can remember their user names?
So you say that you have updated the file but the changes don't show when you refresh the page?
And you have purged the cache?
OK, can you try renaming the file and then refreshing it?
Why would you want to do that? Well just bear with me and try it
And you can still see exactly the same file when you refresh the browser
Can you double check that you have your FTP client pointing to the right site?
Yes, I thought that might be the case, have a nice day
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello_Muddah,_Hello_Fadduh_(A_Letter_from_Camp)
My IT Crowd responses:
It seems very very basic, however this kind of responses are very useful if you are new in moodle, and, of course, if you are not sysadmin.
Are you on the latest version?
Does it work with the clean theme?
No, I know you have your own very nice custom theme, but I just want to check,
Ahh, it does work with clean... you may have a problem with your theme.