Why is Arbor not working?

If you are having performance issues with Arbor MIS, our website or the Help Centre such as 404 errors, there are a few things you can check.

Specific symptoms

Error messages

If you're getting an error on your site, it'll often include an error ID.

First, try the action again by clicking the Refresh page button.

If that doesn't work:

• Contact the Arbor Support Team if supported by Arbor by clicking the link. This will take you to our Contact Us form with the error pre-populated, to send to us via email.
• Contact your Support Partner if not supported by Arbor.

Some staff members may get a Forbidden error message when using certain areas of Arbor while on-site. This is usually due to your school's network settings.

• Ask staff to restart their browser and/or clearing the cache.
• Check your school's network firewall settings.
• whitelist *.arbor.sc (http://arbor.sc/) and *.arbor.education

Intermittent Homepage loading issues

We are aware that some schools that use Smoothwall as their firewall/web filter may experience loading issues with the Arbor homepage. This is due to Smoothwall blocking an error-logging application (Sentry) that Arbor uses to initialise the page.

If staff are seeing an infinite loading screen or spinning wheel immediately after logging in, the school's web filter may be blocking an error-logging application (Sentry) that Arbor uses to initialise the page.

Please pass this to your IT technician to add the details to your school's web filters:

Step 1: Check your Smoothwall settings

Log in to your school's Smoothwall appliance or cloud portal.

• Add cdn.ravenjs.com to your Custom Allowed Content category.
• Ensure this category is assigned to an Allow action that sits above your standard block policies.

Save and Publish your changes.

Step 2: Check your ISP DNS settings

If the domain is whitelisted but the page still hangs, your school's ISP DNS is failing to resolve the site.

• Open your local core router or Active Directory DNS Manager.
• Navigate to Forwarders and replace or supplement your ISP DNS with reliable public Anycast servers:
   
  • Google DNS: 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4
  • Cloudflare DNS: 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1

Clear the network cache by running the following command in an elevated Command Prompt on your DNS server and affected client machines:

DOS
ipconfig /flushdns

Step 3: Refresh and clear browser cache

Lastly, ask affected users to:

• Sign out of Arbor
• Completely clear their browser cache (Ctrl + F5 on Windows or Cmd + Shift + R on Mac) 
• Log in again

The Arbor dashboard will now load instantly.

Troubleshooting

Try a refresh

Hit your Ctrl + Shift + r keys to do a hard refresh. Top Tip: This will usually resolve issues in data, such as new data not appearing in a table, or the Census not finished regenerating.

Try these tips

1. Make sure you are using a computer with a browser to access Arbor. Arbor is optimised for computers, so may not work as expected on a mobile or tablet (unless you are using the Arbor App as a parent).
    
2. Is the problem just with your computer/browser?
   • Check you're using one of our supported browsers. Arbor is optimised for Chrome, but we also support Safari, Firefox and Microsoft Edge.
   • Check another computer, or ask a colleague to check Arbor on their computer.
     
     
3. Check your internet connection.
   • Our recommended internet bandwidth is 2MB. If your network is below that, you will want to look into upgrading this.
   • Do other websites load ok?
   • Check the speed of your connection - you can use a site such as https://www.speedtest.net
   • If the problem is on more than one computer, ask your IT department if there are any issues with your network stability.
   • Try connecting through a data hotspot to 3g/4g/5g to rule out wifi network problems.
      
4. Check your computer.
   • Have you got many other applications open?
   • Do you have any browser extensions which may stop your access?
   • Have you rebooted your computer recently?
      
5. If the school is using a firewall or antivirus, ask your IT department to ensure that *.arbor.sc is added to any whitelist.
    
6. Check our Status page to see if there is an issue with Arbor.
    
7. Clear your cache and cookies - click here for instructions for cache. Click here for instructions on how to clear cookies for the most widely used browsers.

Reporting issues

If none of these steps works, you can submit a bug report using the Contact Us form in the top right of the Help Centre to send us an email.