Wiki

Hi everyone,

I am a research assistant for a professor and I run my prof's Moodle, which he uses for one of his classes. Both of us think this application is awesome - it's very versatile and based on feedback from his students, many of his students think the same.

We do, however, have a recurring problem with the wiki part of the Moodle. Students are required to add content to an overall course wiki, which helps students collaborate and brainstorm with each other and serves as a good central point for study material for the entire course. This is the second semester that we are using the Moodle for a class, and in both semesters once we reach the end of the semester the wiki fails to load. What I mean by fails to load is that the wiki does not load and it seems like the user session "dies" - once you click on the wiki link the browser will sit there loading forever. You cannot reload the Moodle in the same browser/same computer, you have to go to a different computer and login (either as that same user or a different one) to load the Moodle up again. I've noticed that after about 20 minutes, you can reload the Moodle page from a 'crashed' session, so I believe it has something to do with user sessions. Furthermore, by the end of the semester, the wiki gets pretty damn big - maybe it has something to do with this size? We were thinking of setting up two wikis for next term: one containing information for the first half of the course, and the other for the second half of the course.

We are using Moodle 1.7.1 (I think). I'm not at my web server right now so I cannot give more details right this moment, but if anyone is willing to help I will gladly dig up logs and do anything else. I am running the Moodle off of a Power Mac G5 (that's our web server) running Apache, PHP and MySQL.

One more thing. I went digging through the MySQL console and I see that the wiki content is all there (and there's a lot of it!). I know I can dump the contents of the wiki SQL tables out - is there a way I can use this to re-create the wiki? I just want the students to have access to the information they contributed, as the final exam is coming up and it would be good study material for them.

Thanks a lot to anyone who can offer insight and help,

Fil