You are offline. Trying to reconnect... message when viewing course on LMS

Hello everyone, so sorry to hear that this issue is becoming more prominent. I can see that we have some of our support team already working with most of you. If you aren't in a conversation with us yet, please open a case with us here. We will continue to collaborate and consolidate all the information on our end and I can promise to give you an update early next week on our findings. 

Hi everyone, just to keep everyone updated from last week. We are releasing Update 75 today which won't have any impact on the issue being discussed here. The team will continue to look into this this week. 

Edit: I'm also curious about the volume of learners affected by this since last week? Has this increased, decreased or are we continuing to see a consistent number of affected learners on a daily basis? 

You're right, it is rather ridiculous, but if you really need a course to be available, a band-aid approach is better than waiting for a solution from Articulate. We have not experienced any problems with our LMS (which is not SumTotal). We are experiencing this problem with courses published for web placed on an external-facing web server. Interestingly, the same courses run fine on an internal web server that is behind the firewall.

Jurgen, many thanks for posting this. Does the xxxx mean the published filename? I'm hoping there's a way to automate this as there's a lot of js files in publishing!

Regards Chris

Hi everyone! I wanted to make sure that we’re keeping everyone in the loop regarding these issues. We are continuing to investigate the underlying factors that may be contributing to the problem at hand. What we know so far is that some users appear to be running into the lost connectivity alert, and are unable to progress any further in courses aside from restarting the browser, device, or clearing the cache. The intention with this functionality is that the alert is automatically dismissed when the network connection to the course is restored.

We are taking this issue seriously and are continuing our efforts by working with affected users to understand how this feature is operating in the LMS’s involved. We greatly appreciate the opportunity to collaborate with everyone who has responded to our support team.

In the meantime, here are steps you can take to disable the lost connectivity alert in your published courses.

For a course published to web,

• open the story.html file in a text editor, such as Notepad.

• search for the line that begins with features:

• remove the text ConnectionMessages, (including the trailing comma) from the line
• save the file

For a course published to an LMS,

• open the index_lms.html file in a text editor, such as Notepad.

• search for the line that begins with features:

• remove the text ConnectionMessages, (including the trailing comma) from the line
• save the file

After making this change, the lost connectivity alert will no longer be active in your course. You can deploy your course using your standard procedure and the functionality will be disabled.

This is a temporary solution to help authors get their learners unstuck by bypassing the lost connectivity feature. This is like rolling back to Update 68, but unlike a complete downgrade, this solution is more surgical and all the other features and fixes we've released from then up to 75 are still intact for authors to enjoy.

You also mentioned that this can be observed on both LMS and Web. That is correct. This is the reason why there is a solution for both environments in the earlier post. Thank you for reiterating that. 

We have seen the workaround, and haven't vetted or tested the changes James has brought up, instead we've opted for a much simpler solution of changing one line of code in the main html file than changing multiple .js files. 

Just making it clear that we are still investigating and still treating this seriously in spite of a workaround being present.   

I feel I need to jump in and add to how disappointing this is! We've rolled out two training modules to all colleagues and the issues mentioned above have happened for us.  We've had to remove the modules and issue communications to colleagues as the addition of this feature resulted in modules failing to load (Despite increasing network resources 40x usual).

It's all really disappointing to see the lack of communication about this, I was lucky to find this thread. Made all the more disappointing given the recent post: Storyline under a Microscope: An update from the CTO.

Also concerning is this line in a production live output: 

// @TODO this is POC code and can be cleaned up a bit more if we move forward
// with the feature

It really screams of a company who are not at all focused on testing or looking after core functionality, how did this make it to production? It's a little sloppy.

I'll log a support call later but wanted to share concerns here too.

Hello,

My organization is being bombarded with support tickets for Storyline and Rise courses either freezing up or displaying the "offline" message. I tried to disable the connection message in the published project's html files but I am still encountering the course freezing issue. Are there going to be any updates to fix this issue soon?

Hi Stephani, 

Thanks so much for reaching out! I understand your frustration with the freezing and offline messaging you're receiving. Great call opening a support case! One of our talented Support Engineers will be in touch shortly via email. 

We'll continue the conversation over in your support case. 

Have a great afternoon! 

I will be submitting a case, but I wanted to echo that I am experiencing this for the first now as well. 
Specifically, I am using Storyline blocks in a Rise 360 Course. Picture attached.