Discussion Threads - Problems with missing or lost posts

[dholik]

We've been using Canvas since July of 2017 and ever since then we continually get reports from our students that they've posted something in a discussion thread and it is now missing. It doesn't matter if they reply to the main topic or another persons posts it just disappears. We've had several tickets opened with Instructure support but they've been unable to find anything.

We've seen this with the app and pc posts.

Do any of you also see this problem in your Canvas instance?

[greydon]

Hello @dholik 

Usually when a discussion post is lost - it is due to a timeout or lapse in connectivity. A user's browser, device, and network all play a role when posting the discussion replies and clearing the cache on a regular basis will help. Settings on a device or browser also can cause time-outs and keeping a reply open for a while (can be as little as 10-15 minutes) can cause time outs and then the reply is lost. Have you checked the user's page views and confirmed when they were on the discussion and for how long? It is advised anything more than a couple of sentences gets written elsewhere (Good  Docs, Microsoft Word, notes, etc) so if anything happens, they have a copy of it. 

[dholik]

Hello, Yes we've accommodated for as many of these as possible. We added several customizations to our threads such as a warning message of Are you Sure? if someone tries to get off a page without saving their post. We also added the ability to save their post without posting it so they could come back and finish it when ready.

Since we've had this for years we do see that the users were in their thread on the day they said they posted in several examples but it still doesn't help identify what happened because like you said there are a bunch of factors. We've recently ran some analytics about these tickets and we're getting around 200 of them per month which is a lot more than I'd expect to get.

[JamesHickox]

I can never enter my Discussion