LON-CAPA LON-CAPA Help

LON-CAPA Help

If your domain has more than one server you have the option to configure whether any of the servers will redirect to another server whenever the log-in page is requested. This can be useful if you maintain a portal or "Load Balancer" server which forms your institution's gateway to LON-CAPA. You can specify the path to which the user should be redirected, and also whether log-in page requests from specific IP addresses should be exempt from the redirection. The exemption is useful if you run a monitoring script which tests log-in, course display, and logout periodically for each of your LON-CAPA servers.

If your domain only has one LON-CAPA server, or you have multiple servers and will display their log-in pages, their appearance can be customized as follows:

uploading custom image files
changing colors of text, links or backgrounds
enabling/disabling display of specific links

Logos displayed in the login page configuration table are scaled down from the full size used in the login-page itself.

The following elements are configurable:

Header image at the top of the page
Main Logo centered in the upper part of the main panel
Domain logo in the lower left corner of the main panel
Header above the login panel - can also be set to use text "Login" instead of an image.
Background colors for the page itself, the main panel, and the left (side) panel.
Text color used for text on the page
Text colors used for active, visited and unvisited links
Enable/disable display of four links:
- Course/Community Catalog, for a catalog of courses and communities
- Admin E-mail, for the e-mail address of the administrator
- Contact Helpdesk, to display a web form used to submit a help request
- New User, for users to create their own accounts
Default colors for links in the page, depending on status: either active, visited or default (if neither apply).

A "Log-in Help" link will be displayed immediately above any of the four optional links: Catalog, Contact Helpdesk, Admin Email, and New User. Configuration options determine to which file(s) the "Log-in Help" points. The default file can be replaced with a custom HTML file containing information pertinent to your institution. In addition, versions of the custom file, translated into the twelve languages supported by LON-CAPA can be uploaded, and the link will automatically point to the appropriate (localized) file, depending on the viewer's language preference (as reported by the client web browser).

Where the "Contact Helpdesk" web form is in use it can be configured to include a CAPTCHA mechanism to discourage robotic form completion. There are two types of CAPTCHA to choose from - the "original" CAPTCHA which uses a self-contained perl module included with the LONCAPA prerequisites, or ReCAPTCHA, which uses an external web service - https://google.com/recaptcha - and requires you to create an account and generate public and private keys which will be entered in the domain configuration form. If you have more than one server in your domain, you should request "global" keys, as the same keys will be used by the Contact Helpdesk ReCAPTCHA on all servers in your domain. If using ReCAPTCHA, you can indicate whether version 1 or 2 should be used.

The head portion of the log-in page may contain custom mark up (e.g., a script block containing javascript for page analytics) in a file which will be uploaded and published public. Different custom markup may be uploaded for each server in a domain, and a comma separated list of IP addresses may be specified for which the custom markup will not not be included in the page, when the request for the log-in page originates from one of those addresses. A use case for the exempt IP addresses is where robotic requests for the log-in page and made from a monitoring machine, used to detect when a LON-CAPA server is not working correctly.