Tim Hunt

There is not currently a way to do this.

What you can do is go to Admin -> Plugins -> Question types -> Manage question types, and enable and disable question types for everyone.

When I implemented that (many years ago), I did think: "should we make this be controlled by a capability, so you can give permission for some people to use a question type, but not others." But then I thought "No, that would be too complicated". But subsequently, we have seen capabilities like mod/quiz:addinstance, and block/html:addinstance introduced for exactly this sort of purpose for other plugin types. So, we could re-consider whether to use this pattern for question types too, but someone would have to implement it.

So, there is not currently a way to do this. Sorry.

Paying money does not magically make things work. Closed source software is not magically better than open source software. (Often quite the reverse.)

However, setting stuff up to work right does take time, and time from skilled people normally does cost money. And if you are experiencing problems, the the issue is probably that what you have has not been set up optimally, and is not well tuned.

So you are onto something, but I think that your problem is easier to understand if we state the problem more clearly.

You can focus on the 'intellectual property' of the software, and licences, but this is not really want you want.

What you want is a *service*. The service you want is reliable infrastructure that is well tuned to run Moodle. The advantage of building on Open source is that you have many choices for how to get that service.

The modern way to get well set up servers is to go to a cloud provider (e.g. AWS, which many people now use to run Moodle.) Amazon run millions of servers, so they have huge economies of scale, and are very good at it. You pretty directly pay for what you need as you use it.

Alternatively, you could pay a Moodle Partner with the right expertise to give you some consulting on your current setup and how to tune it. (For Linux-y performance tweaking like this, Catalyst IT would probably be a good bet, but other partners are available.)

Or, you could hire a sysadmin with the right skills, and have them run your Moodle setup.

There are probably other options too, but paying for closed source stuff to run on-premise would be low down my list.

Quiz attempts do not just disappear.

Teacher previews of the quiz are deleted automatically. So use Quiz settings -> Check permissions, and verify that the students do not have mod/quiz:preview capability. (If they do, you have a big problem.)

Also (this is unlikely) but check under Moodle's privacy settings. There are settings there to automatically clean up old data if you want. Worth checking that it is not set to delete old quiz attempts.

I agree. This is not something that Moodle does. (Try it at https://qa.moodledemo.net).

As Rick says, from Moodle 3.11 onwards, Moodle will remember the settings used when you create one question when you create a second question of the same type, but this is only done for some settings where that makes sense (e.g. the numbering style for multiple choice choices.)

Hmm. One thought. I guess this symptom could be cause by Moodle's 'autosave' system getting confused. It could be restoring the text from the other question into the new one. However, I cannot see any bug reports from other people experiencing this. (And, if this happened, there would be a message in the form telling you that a draft had been restored.)