Current Bugs & Issues

Here we provide information, status updates, solutions and work-arounds for problems reported by instructors and students.

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ISSUE: An unexpected error message appears intermittently when working in Blackboard.

PROBLEM FIRST REPORTED: August 2011

PROBLEM DESCRIPTION: Error messages are appearing intermittently when users perform usual tasks like clicking "Submit" or navigating to another area in Blackboard.

WORKAROUND: Refresh your browser or quit and relaunch the browser.

PROBLEM: I cannot download and view a PDF.

Description: missing plugin PROBLEM FIRST REPORTED: August 2011

PROBLEM DESCRIPTION: Users cannot display and/or download a PDF. When the PDF link is clicked, an empty window or a download plugin message appears. This is because PDFs that were uploaded using the "File" content type in Blackboard are not compatible with all browsers and versions and there is no one solution that will work for all browser types and for some browser versions there is no solution to the problem.

RESOLUTION STATUS: OTE has turned off the "File" content type until browsers and/or Blackboard, Inc. provides a fix for this problem.

WORKAROUND: Instructors can use the add "Item" content type to upload and add PDFs to their course documents. This operates much the same way as the "File" content type did, but does not cause this error to occur. Add "Item" is located under the "Build Content" menu of a course page.

For those PDFs that have been previously uploaded using the "File" content type, instructors may find that they need to re-upload those files using the add "Item" menu.

ISSUE: Formatting is lost and attempts to fix won't work

PROBLEM FIRST REPORTED: June 2011

PROBLEM DESCRIPTION: Anytime previous content is copied into a new Blackboard course (regardless of which Blackboard version) some formatting can be lost. This is happening with Blackboard 9.1, but we are also finding that users attempting to make additional formatting edits may lose their changes when submitting.

RESOLUTION STATUS: Reported to Blackboard, Inc. This problem is related to the html editor in Blackboard and how Blackboard handles html in general.

WORKAROUNDS:

Option 1 – Copy content from its original formatted text source file (e.g. Word doc) and paste it into a plain text format (e.g. using TextEdit or Note Pad), then copy and paste the plain text into Blackboard.

Option 2 – Try a different browser.

Resolved, Past Bugs and Issues ...