Yacapaca crashing Internet Explorer.

[FN-GM]

Hi,

ICT are using a site called Yacapaca. Its a site used to test the students.

It is crashing IE7 & 8 half way through a quiz. It might be a group policy issue but its hard to drill down as it is very Intermittent.

Has anyone else has trouble with this site?

Thanks

[Edu-IT]

Found this site to be slow and unresponsive at times too.

[Sylv3r]

Is it your internet connection that is causing it to crash? How many students are accessing it at one time? It may just be choking on the bandwith.

[FN-GM]

We have a 100 meg dedicated fibre connection into Zen. When i look out of the office window i can see ZEN HQ. 40 kids on a 100 meg connection so that wont be the problem

[Yacapaca]

Does IE just give up with no error message? The quizzes are running in Flash, so the first suspect is some broken interaction between that and IE. Try reinstalling Flash.

It would also be most useful to know if the fault lies in IE or somewhere in the network. If you can, switch some students to Firefox, Chrome or Safari. If it's a network problem, the fault will reoccur. I know breaking away from M$ can be politically difficult in a school.

Finally, do report the problem to Yacapaca support. We are always happy to help.

[FN-GM]

Hi,

We reported it to your support and the final verdict from yourselfs was use FireFox. But we would like to get it working in IE.

Thanks

[Yacapaca]

Did it work reliably in Firefox? If so, this would at least show us where to focus our attention - either on IE itself or possibly on M$ network management tools.

[FN-GM]

Firefox was perfect....

[Yacapaca]

> It might be a group policy issue but its hard to drill down as it is very Intermittent.

Can you expand on this? It's not an area I am familiar with, but with some pointers I would know who to ask. I take it this is something that could plausibly affect only IE and not other browsers?

[Batman]

Couldn't resist mentioning Makka Pakka...



By the way, Yacapaca, I do feel for you; I find that 20% of the work in creating a web resource is in actually creating the thing, and the other 80% goes into making it work with IE. Shouldn't be that way, it's a pity the browser is so damn popular.

[FN-GM]

> It might be a group policy issue but its hard to drill down as it is very Intermittent.

Can you expand on this? It's not an area I am familiar with, but with some pointers I would know who to ask. I take it this is something that could plausibly affect only IE and not other browsers?

Group policy controls the settings for IE. Something in there could be causing the problem.

[Yacapaca]

Just finished an internal meeting about this. The only thing we are sure of is that it's nothing to do with the server, and by extension can't be related to your network either. Whilst a quiz is running the only communication between browser and server is occasional keep-alive GET requests. Other than that, everything runs locally until after the last question has been answered.

Possible reasons, therefore:

1. Flash has got corrupted on some machines.
2. IE has got corrupted on some machines.
3. Windows has got corrupted on some machines.
   - the answer in all cases above is one degree or another of reinstall.
4. The kids have found a way to crash IE (e.g. with some combination of modifier keys and mouseclicks in Flash) and word has got around. Let's face it, winding up the teacher is even more fun than doing a Yacapaca quiz. If it is this, and you can get one of them to confess how the cheat works, I'll definitely owe you a beer!

[FN-GM]

# Flash has got corrupted on some machines. - Cant be as its accross the board. Different verison of flash on different machines.

# IE has got corrupted on some machines. - Different images on different machines, cant be this

#Windows has got corrupted on some machines. - Different images on different machines, cant be this

# The kids have found a way to crash IE (e.g. with some combination of modifier keys and mouseclicks in Flash) and word has got around. Let's face it, winding up the teacher is even more fun than doing a Yacapaca quiz. If it is this, and you can get one of them to confess how the cheat works, I'll definitely owe you a beer! - it has crashed when i try it for myself

The chances are it will be a security setting some place....

[Michael]

It is crashing IE7 & 8 half way through a quiz. It might be a group policy issue but its hard to drill down as it is very Intermittent.

Does this problem occur with any other Flash websites, such as youtube or BBC for example? Do you use a proxy server by any chance? Have you tried from school, then from home using a laptop for comparison purposes?

If you've tried it as yourself (presumably as an administrator), I highly doubt it's GPO related, but you could use GPMC to see just what IE policies you've set.

[FN-GM]

It only crashes on that site. I have also tried bypassing the proxy.

It think it works fine as an admin