News

We're experiencing some DNS problems, caused by a complete DNS breakdown at our domain hoster which includes the secondary DNS server to be unavailable for almost 3 days now. Although the primary DNS server is still accessible, this might still be causing problems connecting to our site for some users.

We apologize for any inconvenience this is causing, and hope the secondary DNS server will come up soon as well.

For those of you being able to change their hosts-File, you can temporarily add our IP addresses in order to prevent this from affecting you as well (in case the problem should persist even longer):

Services at 21classes.com: 188.40.132.253
Services at 21publish.com: 188.40.132.252

Update: The problems have been resolved, you should not experience any further problems accessing our sites.

Ever wondered why some username like "joe" has already been taken within your BlogPortal? That's because we didn't allow duplicate usernames throughout ANY portal registered with us.

Now, we've removed this restriction, so usernames only need to be unique per BlogPortal, not system-wide. Teachers can now set up student accounts with the same username for different classes, and community bloggers can choose a unique name no matter whether it's already been taken on another side.

We've switched to reCAPTCHA as a mechanism to block spammers. Instead of using our own alphanumeric characters with a few lines, this mechanism also helps digitizing books at the same time. Also, some neat features such as reading the captcha aloud or generating a new one might be helpful.

The content review workflow has been updated, making conversations between student and teacher even easier. Improvements include an updated list of entries to be reviewed, including the current review status, and the possibility to extend the communication between a teacher and each student even after an entry has been published.

Wondering what this content review workflow is? It gives teachers the ability to review a blog entry before making it public. Teachers can post comments to each individual article that are only visible to them and the individual student, not any other students - even once the article is published. This way, the teacher has full control of what articles are visible to the public, while being able to give direct feedback on each article to the student who wrote it.

Curious? Give it a try and sign up with 21Classes.

Anyone now leaving a comment on this blog please note that we activated comment moderation, i.e. we first have to approve each comment prior to its publication.

This step was necessary since we received an increasing amount of spam, and deleting such comments afterwards just took more and more time.