...WebCT aka BlackBoard aka CrackBoard aka bob booy aka carbunckle aka ... officially sucks.

Discuss

-Q

If you use the dropbox function of blackboard, it will allow you to upload files starting with #, .., \, and if you try to retrieve them, it will actually attempt to, and fail (sometimes if you're lucky it will cause the web server software to segfault). There should actually be some kind of code in there to prevent people from doing this.

BlackBoard exploits are always fun. You can access all kinds of goodies, including answers to exams if your professor is sufficiently incompetent.

Most of the Compsci/ other engineering teachers here actually have their own class webpages to avoid the blackboard mess. They actually understand why people hate it.
In chemistry we used some program called OWL to do our homework on. It would mark correct answers as wrong a lot.

The only real issue I've had with BlackBoard (besides being a buggy, poorly designed pile of shit) was a couple of years ago, when attaching documents to assignments, it would bitch that it was an unsupported file type, even though it was a supported file type. The solution was to change your user agent to OS X or Linux so it wouldn't run the check.

They've fixed that now with the new version.

There was a glitch on ours recently where it was taking all requests for classes in the mechanical engineering department and redirecting them to a sociology class. It ended up making ~75 people late on a midterm.

Fortunately I escaped it as most professors avoided it, however some majors (especially the education ones) weren't so lucky...

-Q