Moodle Hyperlink issue in HTML boxes

[mb2k01]

Hi All,

 

I'm hoping someone can make sense of an issue we seem to have somehow developed.

 

On the front page of our Moodle site, if we place a hyperlink in to the front page description block, the hyperlinks change after they are saved.

 

Example.

Link we make points to: EduGeek.net

When you go back to the front page and click on the link it goes to http://moodle.school.lea.sch.ukhttp://edugeek.net and displays an apache error (as I guess you would expect from an address like that!)

 

We have recently switched back to an Apache installation from an IIS one if that helps?

Hopefully someone can point us in the right direction? It is very annoying!

[mb2k01]

No one?

May have to switch back to IIS otherwise!

[gshaw]

Bit of a stab in the dark but are you putting the full

http://www.edugeek.net

as the links or just going for the shorter

edugeek.net

 

www.edugeek.net

etc?

 

Almost looks as if it's picking the links up as a sub-page of your site and branching it off the root path for Moodle...

Edited March 26, 2010 by gshaw

[mb2k01]

I'll take any shot in the darks I can get!

Unfortunately I'd already tired this and it didn't work.

 

Essentially, I'm doing nothing new. I'm inserting hyperlinks to text in the same way I did when the site was running on IIS7. Now that the site runs on Apache I'm getting this strange effect after a couple of minutes of posting the link. Very odd

 

Any one else?

[gshaw]

Another quick troubleshooting idea... if you make a basic HTML page with a set of links and put it in the Apache directory does it experience the same problems as Moodle does? Just thinking along the lines of whether it's the web server itself or a Moodle bug

[secretlife]

Hi there. I have definitely seen this problem on Moodle.org: open-source community-based tools for learning - trouble is, I can't remember the cause or solution and obviously haven't used the right key words to search for it Sorry for the unhelpful response but if you don't fix it, ask on moodle.org because someone hopefully will point you in the right direction.

[mb2k01]

I appear to have fixed the issue - through a mixture of trial and error + hours and hours of searching!

I thought I would post here in case it saves anyone time in the future.

 

The specific issue I was having was:

 

When posting a hyperlink in a block / post on the Moodle front page the URL would appear to malform/redirect after a couple of minutes.

This followed moving Moodle from IIS7 to Apache (something which we had done before without issue)

 

Example:

A link to http:// www. google. co. uk would work for about 2 minutes, but would then turn to http:// moodle. school. sch. uk %22 http:// www. google .co .uk%22

 

To fix the issue I made two changes. The first was to edit the php.ini - changing magic_quotes_gpc from On to Off.

The second (which I think was coincidence more than fix, but I'll mention it anyway) was to go in to the block I was trying to add the link, highlight all text and click the two remove link buttons, then switch to html mode and erase all code/text. On re-making the text and hyperlinks I was able to confirm everything was working again.

 

Hopefully this will save someone the hours of searching + trial and error approach I was forced to take!