issue with Days of validity when setting a course

[nickda]

We are having an issue in forma 1.2 when creating a course.

This issue seems to be with under the category, time options. we are trying to set Days of validity but we noticed the following:

1) Days of validity is actually based upon hours so if you put 5 you get 5 hours, this for us is great as we wanted it hourly based but wanted to point it out to the community.

2) If you set these 5 hours you expect Students to be locked out but Admin not to. Actually what happens is all users get locked out and the timing does not make sense for example when the user hits 10 hours (actually its some random difference) it locks out but this should only happen at 5 hours for the student.

We this that in forma 1.1 it works OK to be honest tomorrow we will heavily test this out and get back to everyone.

We think it might be a case of once a single user had reached the max hours all other users are locked out but we need to look into this in more detail.

Should anyone have any suggestions we would be grateful

thanks

Nick

[max]

Hi Nick,
since you are already testing (and using ) this feature, please do your heavy-testing and get back to us.
I understand that in 1.1 the feature worked as expected, while in 1.2 it behaves like you are describing, right?

If you can provide a full report on what happens, for us it will be easier to open a ticket to the developers and schedule a timing to fix the issue.

Thanks for sharing this!

[nickda]

Hey max we will document all our testing and send it over tomorrow thanks for your support

Regards

Nick

[nickda]

Hi Max,

We still ended up not being able to fix this issue.

Basically as im sure most users would like time is being tacked ( by hour), for Students and Guest. One that time limit has been exceeded they are locked out of the course BUT have the option to re purchase, this makes a lot of sense as you can generate additional revenue should a student want to re-take a course.

The big bug we noticed is that you can get the lock out to happen but it will look ALL user types. This doesn't make sense as as tutor, instructor or Admin would definitely need to spend more time in the course.

I wanted to ask you if you are thinking of fixing this in the next version ? if so could we help you with this in anyway ?

[max]

Hi Nick,

I already proposed this to the developers. We'll let you know if we'll include the fix in the next version.
Development and bugfixing is made by our teams, with assigned tickets and a shared bugtracking, ticketing and workspace system. At the moment we don't plan to include external contributors.

Contribution from community members is normally like this:
- somebody takes care of a bug
- develops a bugfix
- shares it on the community
- we test it, and if it's ok we include it in the following version

[max]

Hi Nick,

we also did some heavy testing and this is what we found out:

- the function works as expected
- "days of validity" refers to ... days of validity, not hours. I understand you would like it based on hours, but it's not like that, it's based on days
- the time is calculated from the user's first access, as expected

A question for you: are you sure it's not a question related to the time zone on your server? Does the Lms display the correct date and time you are in? If not, you have to configure your server to the correct time zone.

Last but not least: while we were at that, we fixed the behaviour of this function in a more logical way. The fix keeps the "ban" for ghosts and students, while teachers, administrators etc. will still be able to access the course.
The fix will be available with Forma's upcoming new release.