URL filtering in Moodle

[cienciascontic]

Hi! I've configured my Moodle quiz to enable access to Rstudio using the following expression: 'rstudio.cloud/*' but when a student tries to open the quiz, SEB displays an alter windows saying: "Access to "" is not allowed according to the current configuration". Am I doing something wrong?

I want students to get access to Rstudio while they're doing the exam providing the link in one of the questions, but I don't want to them to access any other webpage except Rstudio (since Twitter link is displayed at the bottom of Rstudio page will be easy for them to sign in into their twitter account and exchange answers). That's why I decided to use the filtering feature which appears to not work properly.
Please help.
Thanks a lot.

[dbuechel]

You can either check the client log file (to be found under %LocalAppData%\SafeExamBrowser\Logs) after a session to see exactly which URLs are being blocked, or you can enable the real-time application log within SEB to immediately see whether a URL is being blocked or not. Enable that URLs are visible in the log (see the first picture below) and for the latter, allow access to the application log during runtime (see the second picture).

[cienciascontic]

@dbuechel Thanks for your patience. Trust me that I already configured that as you suggested, but the problem is that the quiz doesn't start, I never get into the Moodle quiz. When I click on the button to start the quiz I get the Page Blocked message and no URL appears in any part of the SEB window. This couldn't be so hard... It must be something that is not working from the Moodle side with this configuration. Thanks again.

[danschlet]

The problem is that you would need to change the settings @dbuechel mentioned in the configuration which Moodle is providing when you click the "Launch Safe Exam Browser" button. You could do that by using the option in the Safe Exam Browser settings in the Moodle quiz to "upload my own config". Or you could download the settings Moodle provides for the quiz and then edit those and start SEB manually with the edited file (just open/double click it).

Also you could file a feature request/improvement issue at moodle.org to provide an option to automatically allow the whole Moodle server when the URL filter rules are used for a quiz. I agree that this could be easier to use, but it has to be improved in Moodle, as SEB cannot "know" exactly which URLs should be allowed. In the SEB documentation we mention that the URL filter feature is complicated to use correctly, we only recommend this to administrators which exactly know what they are doing and can analyze such problems you are observing.

[cienciascontic]

@danschlet I already did that and SEB doesn't show any URLs. Try your self with these credentials (don't mind, it's a fake student):

Click here to enter into Moodle

username: linmat
password: SEB123456*

Enter this course:

and then select the "SEB test Moodle quiz" exam.

Let me know then if you see which URL is being blocked.
Kind regards.

[danschlet]

The issue is caused by the '...' quotation marks around the URL filter rules. Did you enter those yourself? If not, then maybe there's some bug caused by the different language or locale settings.

Without quotes at least the general rule allowing the whole server works. Your configuration file contains various Moodle URLs (I didn't try to remove the quotes there), did you enter all of those yourself? I don't really know if Moodle already adds some allow rules for its own server (as we didn't develop the Moodle integration and I personally never tried the URL rule setting). In any case it is not easy to allow only specific parts of Moodle to be accessible, because it uses various paths and php scripts with complex URLs (and some are not visible in a regular browser if you would try to find them out manually).

[cienciascontic]

I can't believe that was the problem.... oh my gosh.... I took that from SEB's manual, but too literally:

Thanks a ton for your help.
Now the filter is working perfectly.
Warm regards.