Bb list members,
BRIEF EXPLANATION: The multiple announcements issue is now explained. Our snapshot file on Thursday night contained all 6,000+ spring course sites. It should have only contained the 10 or so new courses that had been added to the registrations system. This caused the repeated "Welcome!" announcements on all the sites.
CONSEQUENCE: There is no way to automatically correct the problem. I apologize. To correct the problem on your spring 2006 sites, please go to each of your sites and use Control Panel > Announcements and then Remove the extra "Welcome!" announcements.
LONG EXPLANATION: Every hour the snapshot processes starts running and processes any data that is present. If there is no data, it shuts down. If there is data, it processes it. Normally this process takes a few minutes, at most, to create any new courses, add any new users, and enroll both students and instructors in their course sites.. Part of creating a new site is copying the Announcement into the new site. That takes a bit of time. With 6,000 sites it takes longer than an hour. So a second process began before the first process ended and started reprocessing the data. That added a second announcement. This took longer than an hour, so a third announcement was added. With more processes running, the whole thing slowed down. Each one took longer and longer to make it through the entire list of 6,000 sites. The sites at the beginning of the list were processed by all each run that started, but the ones at the end of the list were only processed by the runs that were able to end normally. We killed all runs at around 11:00 AM. The list is alphabetical, so Accounting (ACC) has 10 "Welcome!" announcements while Theatre Arts (THA) only has 3 "Welcome!" announcements.
In order to keep this from happening again we will be getting Blackboard to change the way the snapshot files are processed so that a new job will not start if the previous job has not completed.
Bill Vilberg
305-284-3949 (work); 786-218-3052 (cell); 305-255-9138 (home)
