Report a Bug

Check the FAQ

Sorry you are having trouble. I want to hear about problems you are having but before you create a bug report please Check our FAQ

Get help from the Community

If you have a question that isn't answered in the FAQ there are a number of places to get help from the Runestone Community. Each of our books has a great community of teachers who are willing to help new people get started. Check This List of community resources!

If you are a new instructor there is a very helpful playlist of videos on YouTube. In the summer of 2020 we did a 4 day virtual workshop for 200+ instructors. I can almost guarantee that one of these videos will answer your questions about running a class on Runestone.

File a Report on GitHub

OK, You don't have a question and are still running into some problem. Its time to create an issue on our Github Issue Tracker I regret that I am no longer able to respond to problems sent to me in email. Runestone has just grown too big for that. Filing issues on Github creates a public record that others can learn from and help with. Your own problem may already be on Github, if so, you can add more evidence to the record that will help me (or someone else) get to the bottom of the problem more quickly.

Filing an effective Bug Report

Telling me that X does not work doesn’t really help. The truth is runestone.academy gets over 300,000 page views a day from people around the world. So most of the time when someone says “X does not work” it does in fact work fine for most people. This does not make it your fault, it just means I need more information to try to make sense of what is going on. Here are a few tips

What Task are you trying to accomplish? Understanding your goals is really important as sometimes its not obvious how to do something on Runestone
What steps did you take to try to accomplish that task? Walking me through the steps gives me valuable context and saves me TONS of time in trying to recreate what went wrong.
Specifically what went wrong? What error message did you see? What exactly did happen that you think should not have happened. You can speculate about what you think is broken, but often you will be wrong and misleading. Just the facts is a great policy.
Give some context about your environment. What course are you in? What is your username? What page of the course? Specifically what exercise does not work? Each activity has a unique identifier. please include that. What browser are you using? What version of the browser. (Runestone relies on many modern features of Javascript that are only present in new-ish browsers) We can not test every browser so if you are using something outside of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or maybe Edge it is likely that I have not tested it there.
If there is a traceback on this page, please copy it and include it in your Github Issue.
Many many errors can be quickly diagnosed from the Javascript Console error log. On Chrome this is View --> Developer --> Javascript Console, on Safari ⌥⌘i or Develop --> Show Web Inspector on Firefox Tools --> Web Developer --> Toggle Tools

Please note, I'm not trying to be rude, but years of observation have taught me that CS teachers are pretty bad bug reporters! Imagine if a student sent you the following email:

    Hey,
    
    You know problem 2 for the homework next week.  
    My program just doesn't work.  I'm pretty sure 
    I've done everything right.  Can you tell me how 
    to fix it?
    
    Thanks,
    
    Student

You wouldn't be able to help this student very much, in fact you probably wouldn't have any idea what program that student was even asking about without spending your own valuable time figuring it out. Sadly, It is a pretty good representation of thousands of bug reports I've received. So please, take a few seconds and read or re-read Filing an effective bug report. Thanks.