30 September 2014, 20:56

Hi,

Rather than having our students join every single group they need viewing access to, we get them to join a single 'class of' year group and have added that group to the shared list for each of the resource groups.

When students visit the pages, however, some of them can see images embedded in a text box, while others get an access denied message for the images (but can see everything else on the screen). The screenshot includes a blue square which is the background colour where the image is supposed to be. This issue seems to be intermittent - the same student can view the image on one visit, but next few times they visit the page they get an access denied message for the image.

Link to screenshot 

Any ideas what might be causing this?  We are on 1.9.2testing.

Thanks, Gordon.

29 October 2014, 15:09

Hi Gordon,

Where is the image stored? (In the group's "Content" area, in the content area of a user, or institution, or the site?)

The ability of a user to view an image that's pasted into a tinymce text area like that, in Mahara, is based on whether that user has access to the image itself (i.e., it's their image, or it belongs to a group they have access to, etc); or whether the image is embedded into a page they are allowed to view. And by embedded here, I mean that it's used in an Image block, or as an attachment.

(This current system leaves much to be desired...)

If this is happening intermittently, then that could be because users' access to this image is based on their ability to see some particular page it's been embedded in, and the permission for that page is changing. For instance, if it's embedded in a page that users are accessing by secret URL, their ability to see the image will be based on whether they've visited that secret URL page today or not.

Cheers,

Aaron

29 October 2014, 22:14

Hi Aaron,

It's an interesting one...

The images are held in the group content area of the 'templates' group - the users have access to this by sharing this group with their 'year group'. No secret URLs, but they were using the deep linking 'wantsurl' method to go from Moodle to arrive signed in at the correct page on Mahara.

Originally the images were embedded into textboxes as they were accompanied by some written instructions, but I've since modified this so they are now displayed using an image gallery, with a tetbox alongside containing the written information. This second approach seems to work/look better - but I don't think it was the cause of the issue, because it was intermittently working when the images were contained within the text boxes - ie sometimes users could see the images, at other times they couldn't, and just returning to Moodle and trying the same link again a few seconds later would sometimes work.

Regards, Gordon.

02 November 2014, 16:14

Hello Gordon,

It would be good to know if the students have different access permissions for the images.

Cheers

Kristina

03 November 2014, 21:53

Hi Kristina,

Not as far as I can see - persmissions haven't been modified so they should have the same access that anyone a group is shared with should have.

I haven't had any further reports of issues though so I suspect it was an intermittent issue with connectivity/server timeout that was causing authentication to fail - but whatever was causing it has since been fixed somewhere in the network.

Cheers, Gordon.