Sporadic Errant Warning Emails being sent to students when they are marked Present

[pvdublo7]

Hi Dan,

We are running into a problem where students are contacting us because they received a warning email that they were absent for a class (see my other issue on adding a date wildcard to the warning email message in admin settings) - and yet they were Present for class.

We are finding that the teachers are not mistakenly marking Absent and then changing them to Present.

As I mentioned, this occurs in a rash, where for weeks or months there will be no issue, and then after the cron runs (at 6pm EDT here), there are 4-6 warning emails that are sent out to these 4-6 students that were indeed marked Present.

We are stumped as to why this may be happening. I would be happy to provide any other information to troubleshoot this.

• Is the problem related to building course attendance in course templates and then pushing the new courses through the templates (with the templated attendance)? Don't know.

This has been recurring for about a year now. We are on version 4.5.8+ (Build: 20260130).

Any help would be great.
Thanks.
Paul V.

[danmarsden]

thanks for the report - if you manage to track down any further informaiton around how to reproduce it - feel free to come back and add those details here!

[pvdublo7]

It is a bit of a challenge because it has been somewhat random. The only pattern we have seen is a) these emails seem to go out in a cluster (5-6 emails on the 6pm cron) and that in specific academic terms it happens (did not happen with our pre-semester jumpstart classes) but has repeated for 2 years now on our Spring semesters.

Possible that attendance dates that are added to template courses creates a glitch?

We are still working on gathering more information on this.

Is there a way to gain access to Attendance email logs directly from the tool and not from the Configurable Reports?
Paul

[pvdublo7]

Dan - here is an example:

More info from the teacher:

Student Emi Toma – Marketing 3 (Michael Szydlowski) – April 29 – received an absence email warning when she was marked Present. See attached. Both screenshots are for the same course – emails sent on 4/27 (correct) and 4/29 (should not have received by Emi).

Michael (the teacher) thinks the pattern is that – in this case (note that this does not happen with every course) that a second warning email is triggered after the previous course (when the student was marked absent on that next class). In this case, Emi was marked Absent on 4/27, then got that email warning, which again is correct, but then an errant absence email was sent when he took attendance for the next class on 4/29 – despite Michael marking her Present. What we do not know for sure is whether or not the email warning is being triggered at the next class (in this case, 4/29) or if there was some kind of delay. Is something “stuck?”

Log from Michael’s Attendance shows he took attendance before the 6pm cron to trigger the warning emails,

He took attendance at 9:51am – and then went back in at 11:02am and reviewed attendance again. That being said, again, he did all of this before the 6pm cron.

The warning email seems to get sent when the teacher takes attendance for the subsequent class - even though the student is marked Present on that subsequent class.

Hence the reason also that I was asking about putting a Date wildcard into the email warning so that we can see the exact date of the absence in the email.

Hope this helps, Dan!

[danmarsden]

Thanks - I note you've included what appears to be student information in that post - feel free to delete that.

Whilst the information is useful, this isn't likely to be something I will invest any time tracking further as a volunteer. If you have an engagement with a Moodle Partner you might be able to work with them to identify the cause of this and work with them to submit a pull request for me to reivew to improve it!

thanks,