Dodona changelog

[bmesuere]

This discussion contains the public changelog for Dodona. You can click the "Subscribe" button in the right sidebar to be notified of new updates.

Smaller changes are listed below. Larger changes are added as comments below.

Items listed with 🅱️ are beta features that are only available to users that are part of that preview. Currently, we have one active beta: exam mode

February 2026

• 🐛 Fixed an issue related to created multi-line comments.
• 🅱️ Exam mode beta: Teacher can now pick their own access password for exam series.
• 🐛 Redirecting between sign in providers was broken for a few days. This is now fixed.
• 🐛 Fixed a bug where in some extreme cases, a submission could be saved without judge output.
• 🅱️ Exam mode beta: When a students starts an exam, they can now only access it from that browser session.
• 🅱️ Exam mode beta: From now on, all actions performed by students during a test are audited and logged.
• 🅱️ Exam mode beta: After an exam has finished, teachers can now make the problem descriptions (and submissions) visible again to students.
• 🐛 If a problem description contains an image inside a link tag, clicking the image now follows the link instead of opening the lightbox.
• 🐛 The copy to clipboard button now takes into account <br> tags and correctly converts them to newlines.
• ✨ If a code block contains a single prompt symbol like $ or > at the beginning, it will no longer be copied when using the copy to clipboard button.
• 🚀 When creating a new exercise series, you can now mark it as a series with optional exercises. These series are collapsed by default in the course overview and have no deadline or statistics. For now, you can only set the series type during creation. See this post for more info.
• 🐛 Retesting a lot of submissions could sometimes hang. We now batch those in smaller groups in the background.
• 🐛 The deadline field is now correctly hidden in the series edit form for optional exercises.
• 🐛 We removed the blue outline around optional series. This had the unwanted effect were they became more instead of less prominent.
• 🐛 Fixed a white space issue with optional series.
• 🐛 Fixed a UI issue where a div sometimes wasn't closed on an exercise info page.
• 🐛 Fixed an issue with the series context menu when a teacher was viewing the student's version of a course page.

January 2026

• ✨ We're still actively working on improving screen reader compatibility and keyboard navigation throughout Dodona.
• 🅱️ Exam mode beta: Users must now explicitly start and stop their session when solving exercises in an exam mode series.
• 🐛 The integration with Dolos plagiarism detection has been fixed.
• 🐛 The footer of the page now behaves as expected when viewing images in the lightbox and when there's a long sidebar on the right.
• 🐛 Long image captions are now properly displayed for small images in the lightbox.
• 🅱️ Exam mode beta: Exam mode submissions are only "valid" inside the exam series.
• 🐛 Make JSON parsing more robust to prevent internal errors when the workers are under heavy load.
• ✨ Managing the activities of a series was moved to a separate page.
• 🐛 We fixed several problems with editing and deleting score items in evaluations.
• 🐛 CSV-exports are now explicitly prevented from being cached by the browser.
• ✨ It is now possible to hide reading activities on the series scoresheet page.
• 🐛 Using a link to a hidden series when not yet registered for that course now redirects the user to the course page and nudges them to register instead of redirecting to the home page and showing a generic message.
• 🐛 The compilation error icon is no longer missing.
• 🐛 Fix a redirect bug for duplicate users within the same institution.
• 🐛 When saving an annotations, clearing the title field is now possible.
• ✨ Course descriptions are now always shown full with, even if there are "action card" for the course.
• ✨ The featured courses we show on the home page for new users are now grouped by language.
• 🅱️ Exam mode beta: When manually evaluating an exam series, you can now skip selecting a deadline when starting the evaluation.
• 🅱️ Exam mode beta: In the exam mode settings, teachers can now opt to lock down the rest of Dodona during the exam.
• 🅱️ Exam mode beta: Students can no longer see their exam suggestions after handing in, except if they are part of a released evaluation. We will reimplement releasing an exam in the near future.

December 2025

• 🐛 Fixed an issue where exporting submissions failed if the exercise name contained only non-ascii characters
• 🐛 We improved screen reader compatibility on a number of pages. This will be an ongoing effort over the coming weeks to achieve full WCAG AA compliance.
• 🐛 Submitting code while signed out (in another tab) now results in a more helpful error message.
• 🐛 The queries used to generate the series graphs should be a little faster.
• 🅱️ Exam mode beta: it is now possible to mark an exercise series as an exam.
• 🐛 For correct test cases, we now show the "generated output" instead of the "expected output" to the user (although they are identical in most cases).
• 🐛 Exporting a user listing now work if the course name contains non-ascii characters.
• 🐛 The "jump back in" section on the home page sometimes link to exercises that were no longer available. This has been fixed.
• 🐛 We fixed a number of layout issues on the home page.
• 🐛 The LLM draft responses were broken for the past week, this has now been fixed.
• ✨ The LLM draft responses should now be shorter and more to the point due to an update of the underlying model.
• ✨ The copy button in code fragments now gives richer success/fail feedback when copying content.
• 🐛 Copying code containing links from exercise descriptions could lead to a spurious number being added to the copied content. This is no longer the case.
• 🐛 Dismissing the image "lightbox" in exercise descriptions now works as expected when pressing escape.
• ✨ Correct submissions now get a little celebration.
• 🐛 Math in image captions of reading activities now renders correctly.
• 🐛 Users can no longer accidentally create an evaluation twice.
• 🐛 The left sidebar now works correctly after double clicking the toggle button.
• 🐛 Retesting submissions of a removed or broken exercise is no longer possible because they would always end up as "internal error".
• ✨ Navigating Dodona using the keyboard was improved significantly.
• ✨ We switched our math rendering library from MathJax to KaTeX. There should be no user-facing differences so please contact us if you notice something strange.
• 🐛 We're now more strict on when to show a full diff in the feedback table. This should prevent browser crashes in some extreme cases.

November 2025

• ✨ We greatly improved the styling and compatibility of the emails we send out.
• ✨ A Product and pricing page was added.
• ✨ The sign in page was restructured.
• 🐛 Fixed an error when a user tries to add a label without ever typing anything.
• ✨ On archived course pages, the "course copy" action is now more prominent.

October 2025

• 🐛 Questions from archived courses are now hidden from overviews.
• 🐛 Submissions that are part of an evaluation now contain a valid link for course administrators.
• 🐛 Search filters now properly work when searching for special characters.
• 🐛 On the score item input table, the submit button is now disabled to prevent clicking twice.
• ✨ The Python sandbox and debugger received an update fixing several bugs and layout issues.
• ✨ Courses of the previous academic year are now automatically archived.
• 🐛 The table to edit score items had confusion behaviour. This is now fixed.
• 🐛 The autocomplete list on the sign in page is now properly styled again.
• ✨ The landing page (home page when not signed in) received a fresh coat of paint.
• 🐛 We fixed a few minor UI issues with the python sandbox and debugger.

September 2025

• 🐛 Our CSS is now properly prefixed for older browsers.
• ✨ Courses can now only be made available to everyone after approval from Team Dodona.
• ✨ We improved the performance of several pages by tweaking our database indexes and reducing the number of queries.
• ✨ Folders named preparation are now ignored by Dodona when syncing exercises.
• 🐛 We fixed an issue where filtering tables sometimes failed when using special characters.
• ✨ The exercise info page no longer shows all courses using an exercise. The list is limited to all courses of your own institution.
• ✨ The form to request teacher rights was expanded to ask for some additional information.
• 🐛 We greatly improved the speed of processing exercise repository updates which was slow since the move to Azure.
• ✨ We improved the alignment of all dropdown menus.
• ✨ We removed the counts from the dropdown menus when searching for exercises. This greatly improved the search speed.
• 🐛 In alerts on the top of the page, links looked identical to bold text. They are now also underlined.
• ✨ When editing series from the "manage series" page, we will now redirect back to that page after editing instead of to the course page.
• ✨ Copying a course is now a lot faster.
• 🚀 Old courses are now automatically archived. See this post for more info.
• 🚀 We simplified the registration settings of our courses. You can now pick between open, moderated, and closed. See this post for more info.
• 🐛 When creating a new exercise, a valid programming language must be set before it can be taken out of draft mode.
• 🐛 Fixed several issues with the Python Sandbox.
• ✨ The privacy policy was updated as part of our move from UGent to an independent spin off company. Although the wording has changed, our privacy-friendly philosophy remains unchanged.
• 🚀 We reworked the concept of featured courses. See this post for more info.
• ✨ The sign in page was updated to better reflect the active schools in Flanders.
• ✨ Archived courses are now hidden by default in the courses overview.
• 🐛 Going past the last page using pagination sometimes caused a crash. This is now fixed.
• 🐛 Search filters now properly wrap on smaller screens.
• 🐛 When copying a course, copying course admins is now only possible when the user performing the copy was a course admin of the original course.
• 🐛 Fixed a UI issue where there was a gap around the matching part in autocomplete lists.
• 🐛 Anonymous mode sometimes wasn't applied on the submission listing shortly after enabling it.
• ✨ On some pages with a filter list, boolean search options were hidden in a dropdown menu. They are now part of the other filters making them more discoverable.

August 2025

• ✨ Our errorpages received a fresh coat of paint: https://dodona.be/500.html
• ✨ We have a new dashboard that show the system status and upcoming maintenance: https://status.dodona.be/
• 🐛 Authenticated API requests now use the user's language. This fixes a language bug in the IDE plugins.
• 🐛 Elixir sign in now uses the updated authentication URLs.
• 🐛 On the course edit page, clicking on the copy button no longer triggers a page refresh.
• 🐛 We updated our pagination library which fixes the very long load time on pages showing a lot of items.
• ✨ preserveAspectRatio, stroke-linecap and stroke-linejoin are now allowed in user-generated SVGs.
• 🐛 Figcaptions are now correctly hidden in all cases.
• 🐛 We made a tweak to the docker configuration to reduce the chance of unexpected "internal error" statuses.
• 🐛 Fixed a layout issue on the home page on mobile devices.
• ✨ We added a page containing all subprocessors we use: https://dodona.be/subprocessors.

July 2025

• 🐛 The sign in page was updated to use the correct "Sign in with Microsoft" branding instead of "Office365".
• ✨ We now link to the relevant documentation pages in the email when something goes wrong while processing an exercise repository.
• 🐛 Fixed a case-sensitivity issue which sometimes caused adding repositories to fail.
• 🐛 Fixed an issue where adding users to an evaluation sometimes failed.
• 🐛 Figcaptions are now properly styled.

June 2025

• 🐛 Fixed an issue where the exercise descriptions were not fully visible in some cases.
• 🐛 Fixed an issue where searching for students by course labels failed.
• ✨ You can now filter courses by academic year.
• ✨ Exercise descriptions can now use figcaptions in figure tags by adding the show-caption class to figure.
• 🐛 Fixed an issue where long student names caused a scrollbar to appear while evaluating submissions.

May 2025

• 🐛 Fixed an issue where course cards were sometimes shown multiple times on the home page.

April 2025

• ✨ We made a number of performance improvements, especially when submitting code and when showing listings.
• ✨ We cleaned up the form to create and edit courses. It is no longer possible to set an institution other than your own and academic year is now a dropdown instead of a free text field.
• 🐛 Links from Dodona to GitHub were sometimes broken if the repository used a non-standard main branch name. This is now fixed.
• ✨ We now store the origin country for each institution. This helps us picking a better default time zone for new users.

March 2025

• ✨ All our documentation is now available in English: https://docs.dodona.be/en/
• ✨ The series visualisations received a fresh coat of paint. The new color scheme makes them more readable in both light and dark mode.
• ✨ The icons on the evaluation page, indicating the evaluation status of a submission, are updated to be more easily understandable. See this post for more info.
• ✨ The Python sandbox and debugger received an update. A number of bugs were fixed and it was updated from Python 3.10.2 to Python 3.12.7.
• 🚀 Our universal judge now supports C++.
• 🐛 Adding newlines to a score item description is now again possible by pressing shift+enter.
• 🐛 Due to a bug, it wasn't always possible to submit a (modified) solution from the debugger. This is now fixed.
• 🐛 With some keyboard layouts, it wasn't possible to type [ and ] in our editor. Pressing the necessary keys triggered a fold shortcut instead. The respective shortcuts were removed to enable typing [ and ].
• 🐛 Filtering saved annotations was broken, this is now fixed.

February 2025

• ✨ When not signed in, we now look at the browser preferences to pick a language instead of always choosing Dutch.
• 🐛 Several links to these discussions were broken. They now work correctly.
• ✨ The links to our Twitter and Facebook profile were replaced by links to our Bluesky profile.
• 🚀 It is now possible to optionally set both the natural language and the programming language for your courses. See this post for more info.

January 2025

• 🐛 When making a copy of a course, advanced course settings are now correctly copied as well.
• 🐛 When using the evaluation module, scores were sometimes left blank instead of explicitly assigning 0. This is now fixed.
• ✨ The editor now supports psql syntax highlighting. Use psql as programming language for an exercise to enable this.

[bmesuere]

It is now possible to optionally set both the natural language and the programming language for your courses!

This feature is particularly useful for public courses, as specifying these languages will help other users find relevant courses more easily.

For existing courses, we have automatically set the programming language if all exercises in the course used the same language. You can visit the course settings page to review and update these settings as needed.

[BTWS2]

What if the course is available in both languages like the course of Peter? https://dodona.be/en/courses/4157/

My long term goal is to make the featured courses about websites and databases available in both languages. How does Peter do it, to make the description of a series available in both languages?

[bmesuere]

The advise here is to make 2 separate courses for this: one in Dutch and one in English. Making it available in both languages at once is a hack and not recommended.

[bmesuere]

We have updated the icons that are used in evaluations. Instead of the colored green or red underline, we now use the actual status icon of the submission. This new approach is more color-blind friendly and contains more information.
Before:

After:

[IngeVerbeek]

Ik vind de icoontjes prima, maar ik mis het snelle overzicht met de kleurtjes wel. Is het geen optie om de verschillende icoontjes ook verschillende kleuren te geven?

[bmesuere]

We’ve introduced a new feature: archived courses.

When a course is archived, it goes into read-only mode. This means:

• No new students can register
• No new exercise submissions are possible
• Course administrators can no longer make changes

All existing submissions and course content remain accessible to both teachers and students.

To keep things organized, we automatically archive all courses from previous academic years.

• Courses up to 2023–24 have already been archived
• On October 1st, all 2024–25 courses will also be archived

Only courses from the current academic year are considered active. Active courses determine which users are counted for billing purposes.

[bmesuere]

We’ve simplified the course access settings.

Previously, you could configure both visibility and registration levels, along with automatic or manual approval for new registrations. Many combinations of these settings didn’t make sense, so we reduced the options to make things clearer and easier to manage.

Visibility settings remain unchanged. Registration settings have been streamlined into three clear options:

• Open: Anyone who can see the course (or has the secret link) can register, and their registration is approved automatically.
• Moderated: Anyone who can see the course (or has the secret link) can request registration, which must be approved by a course administrator.
• Closed: No new registrations are allowed.

Reminder: In a previous update, we also restricted how broadly you can set a course’s visibility. By default, new courses are only visible to users from your institution.

• To share your course with people outside your institution, use the secret link.
• To make your course more widely available, contact us about turning it into a featured course.

[bmesuere]

We’ve reworked the concept of featured courses to make them behave more like templates.

In the past, many teachers had their students register directly for featured courses. While this technically worked, it also meant teachers could not properly track their students’ progress. To fix this, students can no longer register for featured courses.

• Teachers can still register for a featured course to explore its content.
• If you want to use a featured course with your students, you are encouraged to make a copy and create your own instance. This way, you can follow up on your students’ progress and customize the content.

As part of this change, we’ve reset all existing featured courses and copied all submissions into archived instances of those courses.

[bmesuere]

Exam mode

We are currently working on implementing exam mode. This will be a bigger feature for which we will need user feedback while implementing. Currently, exam mode is only available for users that are included in the beta. You can contact us if you want to join the beta and provide feedback. For more information about the beta, see https://github.com/orgs/dodona-edu/discussions/139

When creating a series, you can now check a box to mark that the series is part of a test.

• The styling of the series in the course will be slightly different (a colored border and a special blue icon in the top left)
  

• Exercises that are part of an exam will never be part of the "jump back in" features on the home page.

• When accessing exam mode, users must now explicitly start and stop their session. Once they stopped the session, they can not restart it without teacher intervention.

• In the past, submissions for an exercise were "valid" inside the entire course they were made in. If an exercise was used twice in a course, solving it once would mark both occurrences a solved. For exercises in an exam series, this is no longer the case: the status of these exercises is determined only by submissions during the exam inside that series.

• Teachers can optionally disable access to the rest of Dodona during an exam.

• When a students starts an exam, they can now only access it from that exact browser session. When they sign in from another location, they will see an error message.

• From now on, all actions performed by students during a test are audited and logged. Teachers get access to a new timeline view showing all actions for one or all students.

• After an exam has finished, teachers can now make the problem descriptions (and submissions) visible again to students.

[BTWS2]

@bmesuere Please include me to the beta.

[bmesuere]

@BTWS2 @marcothijs @IngeVerbeek Thank you for your interest. I've created a separate topic for the exam mode beta: https://github.com/orgs/dodona-edu/discussions/139 I will add you to the beta as soon as the "scoped submissions" part is implemented. I have removed your separate posts to keep this changelog topic clean. Feel free to discuss your needs and give feedback in the separate topic!

[IngeVerbeek]

Ik zal de examenmodus dinsdag testen. Gewoon om zeker te zijn: klopt het dat de andere opgaven wel beschikbaar blijven voor de leerlingen? Het is dus geen "gesloten boek" test?

[bmesuere]

@IngeVerbeek De rest van dodona blijft beschikbaar tijdens een examen. We werken wel aan een functie waarmee je als lesgever de toegang kan beperken tot enkel het examen, maar dit zal optioneel zijn en kan je kiezen bij het aanmaken van een reeks.

[IngeVerbeek]

Top! Bedankt.

[bmesuere]

Introducing Optional Series

When you create a new exercise series, you can now mark it as an Optional Series. Optional series:

• have no deadline
• are excluded from statistics
• are collapsed by default in the course view (so they don’t clutter the page)

Why this change? Until now, many teachers linked to older versions of a course to give students access to extra exercises. Since older courses are now archived, that workaround isn’t available anymore, so we wanted a clean alternative. We also saw that teachers were already creating “optional” series in practice, but mixing them into the main flow made course pages busy and slower to load.

This is only the first step:

• Soon you’ll be able to edit the series type after creation (and not just set it when creating the series).
• We’ll add an easy way to copy series, so you can move series between courses. E.g., from last year’s edition to this year’s.
• We’ll introduce draft courses: not visible to students and never archived. You’ll be able to use them as a personal “exercise library,” and copy series into teaching courses using the series-copy feature.