Implemented feature idea or fixed bug
I posted about this two weeks ago (see screenshot below) but it appears my post was removed. We are still having trouble searching courses in the filter area. When searching for anything with a space (ex: "Science 7" or "Math 8"), it takes a long time to load or we get a bad request error (see screenshot). We have had to resort to only searching for the first word and then scrolling through to find the proper course. This is causing issues for all of our users and slowing productivity. We kindly request that this be investigated. Another user not related to our school also commented on my post that was removed to say they were experiencing the same issue. Can anyone support us with this concern?
Comments (14)
Prior post that was deleted is above.
Error we receive consistently:
Please also note that we have the fewest courses on our bookshelf we have ever had and have not had this experience before this past month. We have not added a large number of courses (in fact I don't think we have added any in months).
Good afternoon Julianne,
I completely understand how frustrating it can be to experience unexpected behaviors, and I appreciate you reaching out about this. While we haven’t recently made any changes to how the system filters results, I understand that it may feel different on your end. There are a few factors that might be contributing to what you’re experiencing, which I’ll outline below:
Because of these factors, it’s possible to encounter longer response times. To ensure system stability for all users, we have safeguards in place to prevent extended queries from affecting overall performance. This means that when a request takes too long, the system may time out as a protective measure.
We also tested using different machines on different networks to investigate the issue, but we were unable to reproduce the BadRequest error. This suggests that local factors, such as network conditions or device performance, may be contributing to the behavior you’re seeing.
To improve your experience, we recommend simplifying your search filters, shortening course titles, avoiding special characters, and marking courses inactive to reduce the number of results the system needs to process. These steps should help speed up your searches and provide a smoother experience.
Thanks for your quick response! I wanted to mention a few things to clarify:
1. This is happening to staff members across the state of California, on different networks and various devices. I am experiencing it on personal devices as well as school devices and on my home network and mobile network. I have staff members 2000 miles north of me experiencing it in similar ways. This implies to me that it has something to do with our particular instance of Buzz if you are unable to replicate it.
2. With that said, if someone could give an example of a "long course title" I could verify whether ours indeed meet that stipulation. Currently, I experience this with courses that say "Math 4" when we have a handful of courses including "math". In my opinion, these courses do not have long titles.
3. We have fewer than 500 active courses (435).
4. All courses we are not using are marked inactive.
5. If we do not search with whitespace, it does not narrow down our results meaning we have to search through the course list. Is there a planned change such as adding quotations around a phrase to search more quickly?
What would you recommend for next steps based on what I have shared?
Thank you for providing that additional information!
This by itself does not mean that Buzz is the cause of the behavior. There are other factors—like the ones I mentioned earlier—that could contribute to it, regardless of network or location. We also conducted our own testing but weren’t able to replicate the issue of an error occurring, which suggests the issue is not likely directly related to Buzz. For example, below is a screenshot showing our finding when searching by Math 8. As you can see it returns the results.
To be clear, we do notice there is some additional time to return results encountered, but it does eventually return them in our testing. The slowness is attributed to the points I made about the number of courses, their title length, and complexity of the text (special characters) it has to process. Making those previously proposed changes should mitigate slowness and timeout errors for your users.
The top listed course in screenshot provided above is one example of a long course title with special characters.
Based on our logs, the error that you reported occurred while searching for courses in domain ID 72608026. Our backend records currently show 570 active courses in that domain.
On the courses list page, we display a message at the bottom stating, 'Showing top 500 results; filter to narrow your search.' This appears when there are more than 500 active courses, as we limit the displayed results to 500 for performance reasons. However, Buzz still searches across the entire set of active courses—not just the ones displayed—so in this case, it would be searching through all 570 courses.
When searching by a keyword like 'science,' the results are narrowed down to 72 out of 570 courses. However, Buzz’s search operates differently from a standard web search—it relies on a structured database query with built-in limitations.
At this time, there are no plans to modify this feature, but we truly appreciate your input. We recommend trying the previously suggested approaches or trying again. That said, we’ll certainly take this feedback into consideration for potential future improvements to Buzz.
The main confusion for us is that this has never been an issue before and we haven't changed anything about bookshelf. I was looking at the district office bookshelf where we have 435 courses and still have the same issue. Can you help us understand why this behavior would be new?
I unfortunately am unable to say exactly why some users are experiencing this new behavior. We have noticed some slowness filtering the course results in that particular domain (72608026), which can contribute to the timeout error you reported. This type of error is an expected occurrence when a request takes too long to process and is something we’ve observed when working in a few other customer domains for a long time.
It’s important to note that slow response times and timeout errors aren’t just caused by the number of courses alone. Several factors can contribute and compound the effect, leading to longer processing times.
I appreciate you sharing since we have tried countless ways to identify any reason on our end. Are you on your own instance of Buzz or through a curriculum or SIS company?
Hello everyone,
Thank you for taking the time to share your experience with this issue. I understand how frustrating it must be to run into frequent timeouts, especially when it significantly impacts your workflow. We truly appreciate your patience as we work to get to the bottom of this.
NLCI Tech, I’ll be creating a support ticket for you so you have a direct line of communication with Agilix Support regarding this behavior. In general, that’s the best way to ensure a timely response as Agilix Support may not be able to investigate or respond to every report in the Help Center as a commenter desires.
We recognize that unexpected changes in system behavior can be disruptive, and we don’t take these reports lightly. Identifying the root cause can be challenging without clear reproduction steps, but after extensive testing, we’ve found that the behavior is linked to some added syntax to the query it makes on the backend. We are actively investigating this further to determine the best course of action.
We’ll provide updates as soon as we have more information. Thanks again for your collaboration!
Thanks Brian, we appreciate your attentiveness!
(Back to Julianne, we're using our own instance of Buzz; we're actually managing multiple Buzz domains, so the impact of this new phenomenon was observed very quickly when it started)
Thank you so much for your response and for letting us know that there may be a possible reason. Does anyone know why the previous post was removed?
NCLI Tech, we are also on our own instance of Buzz through our student information system and we manage five domains. Sounds like we have a similar situation.
Hello Julianne!
We are happy to report that we have made a change to address this reported behavior. We anticipate it to be tentatively included in our next release on 3/13.
Please confirm that the solution works as expected after the update has completed. The Release Notes in the Agilix Help Center will be posted when the update is deployed.
Have a great weekend!
Thank you so much! On Friday I did not see an improvement, but testing things this morning we are seeing that we are able to search quickly as we once did and without a timeout error. We really appreciate you taking the time to look into this and support our team.