Edu Website Not Loading On A Mac. Help!

Apple General
#1

Hi guys, I hope someone can help me with this website issue.

I’m a lecturer at a Tafe campus in Adelaide. If you’re familiar with Tafe, we provide access to e-learning for all students using our Learn (Moodle) platform. Students can access all their course content via the Moodle site.

Last week a student came to me to say that out of her 5 subjects she could only access 3 of the Moodle pages on her iMac at home. The other 2 Moodle sites refuse to load. They just hang with the site loading continuously. We tested her account on the Tafe PC’s and all 5 sites worked okay, so we know it is not her account.

I tried loading the same sites on my Macbook and my iMac and they will not load for me either on both machines using Chrome, Safari and Firefox.

I also use Parallels and Windows 10 on my Macs and both of the Moodle sites load fine on Chrome using Windows. So it’s not Mac hardware causing the issue. One of the IT staff at work also tried loading the sites using a Mac at work. Both sites loaded okay on his Mac using Safari, Chrome and Firefox. So the issue seems to be random Macs.

I’ve advised the student to clear her caches and cookies, but that hasn’t worked. Have any of you guys come across this problem before? I don’t understand why these 2 Moodle pages work fine on a PC but will not work on random Macs. Help and advice would be much appreciated.

Joe

#2

There’s nothing much that can be done unless its a caching issue on he ISP end which I doubt. While Australian ISPs used to be terrible with regard to holding old cache content of recently updated sites, it’s not really a thing anymore.

Make sure that your student is running the latest version of Chrome or Firefox. As Safari is a system level update now it can be problematic if the user hasn’t updated their system software.

TLDR: Get the latest version of Firefox/Chrome and make sure tha the user has cleared out their cache/cookies.

#3

I had what seemed to be the same issue on the moodle site at my daughters local secondary college last year, as far as I’m aware the issue was not resolved but it doesn’t seem to be happening with moodle at her current campus.

As we had easy access to PCs as well as Macs we never chased up the issue.

#4

Thanks guys. Interesting Geoff that your daughter had a similar issue. Orestes when I tested the sites on my Mac using Firefox it was a brand new download and install of Firefox. The sites didn’t work on that fresh copy of Firefox. It’s weird that they work on some Macs but not on others.

#5

Its either some kind of random code bug where it’s just broken enough to work properly and broken enough to not work on some computers, or otherwise the thing I can think of is that you’re not waiting long enough, or trying hard enough.

Sometimes a page can appear to have hanged but if you wait long enough it will load. The other way about it is to try it again and see if you can get through. As per above, the code is broken enough to work occasionally but not always.

Get on to your admin at your TAFE and tell them to look at what’s going on in terms of the back end, whatever the database is it will have a console that is logging errors that are thrown up by the database, also the same applies to having a look at the moodle platform. The admin section will also have a console that will give you an idea if anything strange is happening.

I haven’t used Moodle, but this is all present in other front/back ends to what is being run, from the perspective of this website being WordPress.

#6

Interesting - I use Moodle and its variants a lot as I teach (using it now) and never had issues with my macs using chrome. It is finicky due to permission issues at the backend but I’ve never heard of the issue raised here.

#7

I’ve put up with this bug ever since our university moved its back end to Office 365, sometimes the Outlook page will appear to hang when its loading but if I wait long enough it will magically load. I’ve put it down to MSQL and a terrible server platform/software package. Unfortunately it’s what they’ve given us since moving off a Novell platform.

Novell is good by comparison for what it does well such as handling trees, and deployment which still are far superior to anything you can do in Active Directory. I have a hate filled relationship with Microsoft products by comparison.

#8

Interesting, I know TafeSA also uses Office365 and I believe Moodle is being hosted by Microsoft. I did try opening the sites on my iMac again today and left if for over an hour hoping they would eventually load. They didn’t.

I have logged a job request with E-Learning support but I can’t imagine it will be a priority for them. Thanks for the input guys, much appreciated.

#9

Interesting that you guys were using Office365 too as at the time we were using it, but we’ve since moved back to Office 2013.

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