Skip to main content

Hello Community. So this week, users started getting a 403 error when attempting to “Ask the Expert.” Only superadmins would not get the error. I wracked my brain trying to troubleshoot this as it was working previously with no obvious changes to anything. I ended up in with a support ticket.

The “solution” was very surprising to me and I want to share in an effort to save others some time and effort. Surely I can’t be the only one who’s experienced this. The solution as per support was to enable the setting “Users must select a channel when asking questions” in Discover, Coach and Share Settings. (We were not previously requiring the user to select a channel to assign the question to because our Q&A is set up to seem more like a discussion forum and we didn’t want to force user to pick a channel.) So now we are forced to require the user to assign a channel. So I set up a “General Discuss and Share” channel, put it at the top of the channel list so the user doesn’t have to think too hard to get the question or comment in a channel.

The bottom line here is that a change was made a few weeks ago in preparation for a new feature coming later this year that will allow Q&A content to be filtered and shown in the appropriate channel. IMHO not a very elegant or well documented change that had a big impact on us but I digress. We are excited about the upcoming changes and will benefit from improved functionality with Q&A and channels and it’s just as well that we start having users assign their Q&A to a channel but it’s been a bit of a headache for us this week. Hope I can save some other administrators the same hassle. 

P.S. If you are interested in how we set up our social “Discuss & Share” in our platform, check out my post at 

 

Thanks for sharing. I didn’t realize that we even had the option to not require they select a channel. Did that change? 

Coach & Share is great except when you try to do anything that isn’t perfectly within the confines of the intended use case, as intended. It’s slowly gotten better over the last couple of years, but we have hidden, via settings or custom css, most of the functionality to avoid issues. The only reason we use it currently is to enable “Video Channels” - to allow users to access short video tutorials quickly without having to first enroll into them. 

@mark Good question. I can’t say for sure about whether it existed previously although it hasn’t been a documented change to my knowledge in any of the monthly releases over the past several months. And, I also had no idea this setting existed. But, here’s my understanding. (Maybe a Docebian can weigh in especially if I have anything wrong here). So, we had the option not checked to require a user to select a channel when asking the expert. Docebo has been making some “under the hood” changes in preparation for the new Q&A/channel functionality and my guess is that in order for that to work going forward, Q&A will have to be linked to a channel so maybe that setting will go away??? Anyway, whatever they are doing on the back end, caused the system to throw a 403 error for all users (except Superadmins) if they tried to save an “Ask the Expert” question without specifying a channel. And, the usability is really weird. When the user asks the question, it defaults to “Do not assign to any channel” but in essence they can’t proceed with saving unless they select a channel. I’m hoping these little usability quirks will be resolved once we get the new features later this year. 

Here’s a post from @Marco.T regarding the new features that are coming in case you’ve missed it.

 

Hello, sorry to hear about your issue with 403 error


 

The error you are facing  is not an expected behavior,, i can confirm that the “not linked to any channel” feature will remain available

In general the new functionality mentioned (preselected channel for q/a widget)  will not bring any change to existing users / configurations

Our learning and support team will contact to manage and fix the issue

Marco

 

Hello

The error you are facing  is not an expected behavior,

( the new functionality will not bring any change to existing users / configurations)

Our learning and support team will contact to manage the issue

Marco

 

@Marco.T I already have an open case  #162298 if you want to have a look. And please again weigh in if anything changes with what I have documented here. Thanks so much.

I am happy to report that Docebo is going to address the issue with the 403 error. I am assuming @Marco.T called attention to this case and I’ve been informed by support that a fix is anticipated by the end of this month. Thanks Marco!

Reply


Terms & ConditionsCookie settings