RCE Image Embed should ignore user quota on graded activities

Choachy
Community Explorer

Before I think about submitting a feature request, I want to make sure I am understanding this behavior correctly. This has come up a handful of times for us...

Teacher has posted a graded discussion, graded quiz with essay question, or graded assignment with online submission-Text Entry. The teacher instructs the students to embed an image into the assignment response. A student trying to complete one of these assignments has exceeded their user account storage quota (they are over 100% for whatever reason). When the student tries to embed the image, they get a cryptic error that does not indicate they have exceeded their quota (I believe it just says "File upload failed"), but that is in fact the cause of the error and they are unable to complete the assignment.

We've always been under the impression that Canvas would never prevent a student from completing a graded assignment due to quotas. If these were file upload or file attachment type activities, this would be true and they would submit just fine, despite the user quota being exceeded.

However, after a recently response from Canvas support, we have learned that the RCE image embed function temporarily stores the image in the user file storage before submitting. Therefor, if they do not have space, it throws an error. We've been able to replicate this behavior. 

The release notes from 2020 are a bit confusing, but here they are:  https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Releases/Canvas-Release-Notes-2020-12-19/ta-p/424284#toc-hId--165...

And this was the response from Canvas support: I understand the documentation that you provided said the quota doesn't count when you submit a video or file, but embedding the file still needs enough storage to process it, but it doesn't use the actual storage after that since it's stored as an embed image at that point.

It doesn't count against their quota, but it references their quota in order to process the file. WHY?

In my opinion, this should never be the case on a graded assignment. Not only is this preventing students from completing assignments, the error message does not provide an indication of the problem (that they have exceeded their user quota).

Thoughts?

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