Prompt to resume on quiz restart and use Flash cookies

Problems with using flash cookies

This method, however, introduces a new series of problems. First, if a user (user “A”) suspends a quiz after completing a portion of it and logs off, a flash cookie is stored on the computer locally so that next time user A comes back they can resume the quiz at where they left off using the cookie. However, the quiz sometimes confuses the flash cookies. If another user (user “B”) logs onto the same computer user A used and attempts the same quiz (a common quiz assigned to both users), user B may get prompted to resume the quiz. If user B chooses to resume it, a portion of the quiz will be populate with the answer user A had filled in previously because the quiz is using the cookie that was stored for user A. This is believed to be due to the fact that Flash Player can only read and write flash cookie onto the hard drive on a per-domain basis, thus unable to differentiate multiple cookies stored all for the Firmwater domain.

Another problem with this is that users can not switch computers while doing a quiz since the cookie is stored locally. If a user decided to do half of the quiz on a school computer and the other half at home, the answers will not transfer over because the cookie is stored locally on the school computer (and may be modified by other students using the computer to take the same quiz).

Lastly, once the user finishes the quiz, the cookie always seems to indicate that the user has finished the quiz. Even when the user chooses not to resume when prompted and start over the quiz from the beginning, if they quit the quiz half way and try to pick up where it was left off later, the resume prompt will always take you to the user’s previous quiz summary page. One way to work around that is to delete the flash cookie currently stored on the computer and restart the quiz. This is obviously a huge hassle for the end-user and not realistic. 

Flash cookies are actually very hard to locate as well. When there are multiple sessions of quizzes stored as cookies, the quizzes gets very confused and seem to pull random cookies from the hard drive to use. For more information on how to flash cookies work click here. You can view and delete all the flash cookies stored on your computer here. Wikipedia has an in-a-nutshell description of Local Sharable Objects data type (which is what flash cookies are) and can be viewed here. 

In conclusion, for the flash cookie to work properly with resume function, it must be the user’s first time attempting the quiz and there can’t be any other users doing the same quiz on the same computer. The resume function will not work if the user had finished the quiz once before and is attempting it again.