Bugs, Issues, Fixes and FAQs

The current release versions of Hot Potatoes are:

General bugs

Date Problem Cause Fix
03/03/2003 JavaScript errors occasionally occurred in JMix v5 and v6 standard output. On placing the mouse over one of the segments in the exercise, a JavaScript error would occur if the configuration item "Click to add a word to the sentence" contained an apostrophe. This is fixed in version 5.5.0.16/Windows and 5.3.5/Mac. Thanks to Michael Rottmeier for finding this.
30/10/2002 Submitting through CGI would occasionally fail on IE. The inclusion of the parameter "Submission" in the window opening code would occasionally cause submission to fail. This is fixed in version 5.5.0.13/Windows and 5.3.3/Mac. Thanks to Steve Narmontas for finding this.
16/10/2002 Checking a correct answer twice in JQuiz changes scoring Checking a correct answer a second time would cause JQuiz v5 and v6 pages to decrement the number of questions answered correctly first time (not the percentage score). This is fixed in version 5.5.0.11/Windows and 5.3.2/Mac. Thanks to Elek Mathe for finding this.
07/03/2002 Use of a timer on a reading text which is an external URL causes JavaScript errors when the time expires. Once an external URL is loaded into a frame, JavaScript cannot then clear the frame or write new content to the document. This is actually reasonable behaviour on the part of the browser, and in view of the fact that hosting external pages in one's own frameset is generally viewed as unacceptable behaviour, we may remove the option from Hot Potatoes in future anyway. Don't link to external reading texts -- use your own local files to create the reading.
07/03/2002 Netscape 6.2+ fails to submit exercise data to CGI successfully. Netscape 6.2+ fails to submit data in a format that the FormMail PERL script will accept, resulting in a default FormMail response and no email being sent. This looks like a bug in Mozilla (the Netscape engine) -- we think it may be related to Bugzilla bug 125718. Thanks to Pete MacKichan for finding this one. Exercise submission and score tracking can now be handled through hotpotatoes.net, so this is not as big a problem as previously.

Windows bugs

Date Problem Cause Fix
03/06/2003 The Classlist form used when uploading to hotpotatoes.net shows truncated on some computers. My fault. I didn't allow for less common font and resolution settings. This is fixed in version 5.5.0.22/Windows. Thanks to Louisa Dykstra for finding this.
03/02/2003 If an apostrophe is included in the caption of the OK button in JMatch v6 drag-drop output, it will appear preceded by a backslash. My fault. I was escaping the apostrophe unnecessarily. This is fixed in version 5.5.0.17/Windows. Thanks to Michel Liddle for finding this.
13/01/2003 JCloze occasionally mixed up the sequence of gap answers. My fault, exacerbated by oddities in the Windows RTF control's handling of carriage returns; when a gap was right at the beginning or right at the end of a line, the code which counts previous gaps (to find the number in sequence of a new gap) would miscalculate. This is fixed in version 5.5.0.16/Windows. Thanks to Lev Abramov for finding this.
27/11/2002 JBC version 6 output had bad XHTML table structure in the Question display. My fault. Extraneous colspan settings were used in the JBC6.ht_ source file. I failed to check my code properly when converting between the older v6 buttons and the new XHTML button tag. This is fixed in version 5.5.0.14/Windows. Thanks to Thom Hiemstra for finding this.
27/11/2002 Uploading to hotpotatoes.net would fail if a proxy server was being used. No provision was made to handle proxy servers in the early releases of 5.5. This is fixed in version 5.5.0.14/Windows. The program now picks up the proxy server settings from Internet Explorer and offers to use those if available.
30/10/2002 Hot Potatoes 5.5+ will not run on older versions of Window 95. If you install HotPot 5.5 on Win95 and get errors when you try to start a Potato, you may have this problem. It is caused by an incompatibility between the hotpotatoes.net upload code and older versions of the Windows winsock dll. Windows95 is not supported for HotPot 5.5 and above. You can download a previous version (5.4) from the main page.
30/10/2002 Creating drag-drop output from JMatch when a blank item was included would cause JavaScript errors. If the first item, or any item in the middle, was blank, then JMatch would create a broken page because array counts were inaccurate. My fault. This is fixed in version 5.5.0.13. I can't remember who reported this -- if it was you, please let me know so I can add credit here!
09/10/2002 Changing the exercise title colour has no effect in JMatch version 6 output. My fault -- a colour setting elsewhere in the CSS was overriding the title colour setting. This is fixed in version 5.5.0.10. Thanks to Henny Jellema for finding this.

Mac bugs

Date Problem Cause Fix
16/12/2002 Trying to close JBC caused an error message to appear unless main editing window was visible. Bug in my code attempted to configure some objects after those objects had already been closed down. My fault. This is fixed in version Mac 5.3.4 which is now available for download. A number of people reported variations of this problem. In version 5.3.3, if you ensure the main question and answer editing controls are visible when you try to close JBC, you won't get the error message.
26/02/2003 Accented characters included in "appended" exercise questions were incorrectly imported. Bug in my code treated the accented characters as Windows rather than Mac characters. This is fixed in version Mac 5.3.6 which is now available for download.