Smart Search Displaying Scheduled Announcements

[BrittMoore1]

10/30 - Update: This issue can no longer be produced in Canvas. I assume they have resolved it on their end. 

Smart Search is displaying scheduled announcement details to students before the instructor is ready for them to receive this information, hence, they are scheduled for later. 

When acting as a student, I am able to return an announcement that is not yet posted to the course. In the Smart Search preview is the entirety of the announcement content, when I click on the announcement it does tell me I don't have access, but I already read it all in the Smart Search preview, so I did have access. 

I imagine this is not working as intended. 

[IvanZheng]

Similar to this, Smart Search displays pages with prerequisites(haven't been completed yet), and the preview also shows the content.

After clicking on it, it will tell you the page 'hasn't been unlocked yet.'

[DiliaraNasirova]

Yes. I can recreate this in our account as a student as well. This needs to be addressed.

[d_j_corbin]

@BrittMoore1 , @IvanZheng or anyone else - have you sent this to Instructure Support? I just did asking them to read these comments and look into it, and they responded "Could you please, give us more details so we can take a better look at this behaviour? We will need a link to the specific item that the search shows, the term used to search for it and a link to the person's account who ran the search or you acted as when searching for the announcement."

Surely they can try to re-produce this problem themselves...or maybe even one of the Instructure employees responsible for this forum?

There are certain types of announcements that teachers do NOT want students seeing before it is published or unlocked, so I believe this is bug that needs to be prioritized. The same goes for the other bugs regarding unpublished course content that Smart Search shows students -- Instructure can easily take a look in the forum and prioritize these things.

[d_j_corbin]

Ok, I can't reproduce this behavior in my Canvas instance while acting as a student (I've only tried an unpublished announcement), but I do see it with my own user permissions (account admin).

Even if they fixed the bug with the unpublished announcements in Smart Search in the last week (we haven't got any confirmation of that?), it still is problematic that Instructure doesn't respond to comments in this forum to keep us updated, which degrades trust in the functionality....

[BrittMoore1]

I am unable to reproduce the issue of scheduled announcements showing any longer as well. I assume it has been resolved by Canvas.  I agree, communication would be nice. 

[IvanZheng]

I am also unable to reproduce the issue of scheduled announcements and pages with prerequisites showing; it seems they have been resolved. I was about to talk to Canvas support. I guess Instructure staff are watching this forum? If they could reply to our post it would be better.

[atbarbary]

Sort of fixed...

So, it won't show if publication date is set for the future. However, it doesn't remove it once the Until date has passed. (I artificially set it back, I didn't wait for it to expire). 

Announcement set for future - not searchable

Announcement until date passed - still searchable (even though not displayed on Announcement page)

I feel the second case isn't as problematic for most, but highlights that permissions are not being fully honoured. 

[bec_plumbe]

@atbarbary , I wonder if the content will be re-indexed at a certain point - perhaps after 24 hours - after which the past announcement will no longer show up in Smart Search?

I've just been trying searches in one of my test sites, and no announcement content at all seems to be coming up in the results, even when I search for the actual announcement title, there are no restrictions on it at all, the announcement has been in place for some weeks, and I've turned Smart Seach on in the site about a week ago, so most things should be indexed. So maybe announcement results are being suppressed in SafeSearch for now, either on my Canvas instance or perhaps on everyone's...