Moodle Plugins directory: DemoStudent block: Comments

Tuesday, 5 July 2022, 4:11 AM - Dom Royko

Mon, 04 Jul 2022 20:11:41 GMT

by Dom Royko.

Hi Blair,

Looks similar to what Kirk was experiencing last year (see comments above). Take a look in blocks/demostudent/locallib.php at the function create_demostudent_account(). That's where the email address for the newly created account is set, and you can modify it to something that will work for your system, or something meaningless. If you use something meaningless, like an @example.com address, you will unfortunately lose the ability to test email notifications. Having an email alias which maps to the same user (perhaps using capitalisation?) would be better. For existing demostudent accounts, you can find them in the database using the query "select id,username,email from mdl_user where firstname='DemoStudent';". How you want to replace these will depend on whether you can get aliases working. Hope that helps.

Tuesday, 28 June 2022, 11:47 PM - Blair F.

Tue, 28 Jun 2022 15:47:05 GMT

by Blair F..

We've been using this block for several years now. Our I.T. department is moving us over to Azure Single Signon and has found an issue with the fact that this plugin creates accounts with the same email addresses as the original user. They're suggesting we may have to hack the code to change this! Has anyone else experienced this issue and solved it another way? Thanks, in advance.

Friday, 3 September 2021, 1:43 AM - Dom Royko

Thu, 02 Sep 2021 17:43:35 GMT

by Dom Royko.

Hi K,

Needing to log in again when switching back to the instructor role is required, depending on the authentication settings of your site. The workaround we suggest to our instructors is to have two browsers open (or one browser using a regular as well as an incognito/private window), with one logged in as themselves, and one switched to the demostudent role. This also allows easier checking of effects as settings are changed.

Wednesday, 1 September 2021, 10:45 PM - K Hurt

Wed, 01 Sep 2021 14:45:59 GMT

by K Hurt.

Currently experiencing an issue where switching to the instructor role completely logs out of Moodle and we have to sign in again. We are on Moodle version 3.9 and using version 2019101800 of the block.

Thursday, 18 March 2021, 11:35 PM - Dom Royko

Thu, 18 Mar 2021 15:35:54 GMT

by Dom Royko.

Hi Kees,

We have not tested the plugin with 3.9. We plan to upgrade to 3.10 this summer, so we will be looking at it again in the next 3-4 months. A preliminary test after upgrade to 3.10 seems to work fine. If you run into any problems with the plugin on 3.9, let us know.

Thanks,
Dom.

Thursday, 18 March 2021, 10:22 PM - Kees Koopman

Thu, 18 Mar 2021 14:22:00 GMT

by Kees Koopman.

Hi Greg,

Thank you for the DemoStudent plugin.
We now use Moodle 3.9
Can your plug-in be used there too?
I see that the last update is from October 2019.

Thank you in advance for your response.
Sincerely,
Kees Koopman

Monday, 25 January 2021, 8:37 PM - Dinis Medeiros

Mon, 25 Jan 2021 12:37:42 GMT

by Dinis Medeiros.

Thanks for the plugin. PT-PT translation on the way.

Saturday, 16 January 2021, 3:29 AM - Dom Royko

Fri, 15 Jan 2021 19:29:37 GMT

by Dom Royko.

Hi, Kirk. We have not seen what you describe. It sounds like it's at least partially due to an interaction between the manual accounts and your sync process. It should be fairly simple to change the email address of the created DemoStudent user to @example.com or some such, though you would then lose any email sent to them. (Creating a subdomain or alias would be better, but more work on the infrastructure side.) It would probably be good to have a sanity check that DemoStudent users are not creating other DemoStudent accounts, which might help with the first part of the issue you're seeing. I haven't looked at the code in a couple of years, and since it's stable here, it's a backburner project for us, alas.

Friday, 15 January 2021, 5:12 AM - Kirk Martinson

Thu, 14 Jan 2021 21:12:11 GMT

by Kirk Martinson.

Dom (or Greg or anyone else who may have experienced this) -
We're having sporadic incidents of a teacher creating a DemoStudent, and at the same time as the creation/enrolment of the DemoStudent and them being given the role of demostudent, they are given a teacher role, and then ANOTHER DemoStudent (of the DemoStudent) is created/enrolled/given student role. This seems to also cause the teacher to be suspended from the course when the next sync with our registration database happens (likely due to the fact that the teacher DemoStudent and the teacher have the same email). Additionally, the DemoStudent teacher then shows up as being a database enrolled user and not a manual one. Therefore you can't alter the user in the course, the user needs to be completely removed from the site at the admin level. After doing this, the teacher gets reinstated from the database. Lots of strangeness. Any ideas?
kirk

Friday, 20 December 2019, 2:36 AM - Blair F.

Thu, 19 Dec 2019 18:36:24 GMT

by Blair F..

Is anyone else still experiencing the issue that prevents NEW teachers from creating DemoStudent accounts? This is really starting to become a problem for us, since we have more and more new faculty every term, so more and more faculty are not able to use this wonderfully useful plugin.

Saturday, 2 November 2019, 4:29 AM - Blair F.

Fri, 01 Nov 2019 20:29:29 GMT

by Blair F..

Just an update: We implemented the solution mentioned in https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=388850 and it made no difference. We are still experiencing this strange issue with new users.

Tuesday, 22 October 2019, 6:00 AM - Blair F.

Mon, 21 Oct 2019 22:00:36 GMT

by Blair F..

Thanks, Dom. I'm not sure, but we have a bunch of new instructors experiencing this, or similar, since updating to Moodle 3.6. In SOME cases, the above message doesn't occur, but when they try to switch to demostudent, they are taken to a user profile account with missing username fields that are also disabled. They are unable to get past that point. When I look at the Participation list for those classes, I notice a demostudent account with no username, id, etc.

Tuesday, 22 October 2019, 4:46 AM - Dom Royko

Mon, 21 Oct 2019 20:46:17 GMT

by Dom Royko.

Hi Blair, I was just testing a fresh install with 3.7.2, and did not see this. The plugin certainly never explicitly calls cache functions. However, it sounds like it could be another manifestation of this issue: https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=388850

Tuesday, 22 October 2019, 4:30 AM - Blair F.

Mon, 21 Oct 2019 20:30:21 GMT

by Blair F..

Is anyone else getting the error message, "Exception - Call to undefined method cachestore_dummy::find_by_prefix()" when a user tries to create a DemoStudent account for the very first time? We're using Moodle 3.6.6.

Thursday, 17 October 2019, 7:08 AM - Dom Royko

Wed, 16 Oct 2019 23:08:45 GMT

by Dom Royko.

I've confirmed the bug on a fresh install of Moodle 3.7.2. Andreas sent me the error messages and I'm looking for a fix. Same issue as before (MDL ticket linked above) - on installation, the plugin is trying to assign a capability that has not been created yet. Users who are upgrading an existing installation already containing the block, will most likely not see the error.