Sakai 25 Patch Highlights: October 2025

October’s patches focus on the places faculty and support teams live every day: grading work, moderating conversations, and keeping the course homepage tidy. We took extra time this month to call out the fixes you’ve told us matter most, and to note where 25.x-exclusive improvements can help you make the case for an upgrade.

Most of the highlights below ship in both the 25.x and backported 23.x streams; anything exclusive to 25.x is flagged so you can plan accordingly.

Assignments & Rubrics: Keeping Feedback Flowing

Instructors asked for less busywork when they’re double-checking draft settings or leaving contextual comments, and these patches deliver.

SAK-51946 remembers the open state of Model Answer and All Purpose items after a file upload, so the right guidance stays on screen while you continue editing (23.x & 25.x).
SAK-51947 removes the unnecessary “you must type something” warning when an attachment is the whole point of a Model Answer or All Purpose item, eliminating noisy alerts for instructors (23.x & 25.x).
SAK-51724 restores rubric criterion comments in the instructor view, making it easier to confirm the exact feedback students will see before publishing grades (23.x & 25.x).
SAK-51967 protects against out-of-order rubric criteria, which previously produced confusing scoring columns for both instructors and learners (23.x & 25.x).

Conversations & Course Mail: Clear Paths for Students

Course conversations work best when moderation and follow-up actions are clear. A few small repairs add up to a more dependable loop between discussion, grading, and outreach.

SAK-51981 keeps moderated posts hidden until they’re approved and masks authors on anonymous topics unless you have the role to reveal them, helping instructors feel confident about sensitive discussions (23.x & 25.x).
SAK-52058 brings back the student mailto: links in Samigo’s Total Scores view, so follow-up nudges are only a click away after grading a quiz (25.x only).
SAK-51033 removes the Options menu for students in the synoptic Announcements tool, closing a confusing dead-end and keeping focus on the messages themselves (23.x & 25.x).

If you’re spinning up a brand-new course or stewarding a seasoned one, these fixes keep the Sakai homepage feeling intentional instead of haphazard.

SAK-49686 ensures at least one Overview widget remains on the page and warns before the last one is removed, protecting your course homepage from accidental blank states (23.x & 25.x).
SAK-52061 lets you add the Overview widget back after it has been removed—handy for support teams rescuing older sites (25.x only).
SAK-52027 makes the Calendar remember whether you prefer month, week, day, or list view when you click “Set as Default,” a small win that saves orientation time for students (23.x & 25.x).
SAK-51894 and SAK-51919 tighten Lessons imports so “not in use” pages don’t suddenly reappear during a site copy, letting instructional designers stage content without cleanup (25.x only).

Visual Polish & Guardrails

The long tail of polish continues, with attention to readability, data hygiene, and integrations instructors rely on.

SAK-51973 adjusts color rules so Lessons holds up in dark mode, preventing headings and buttons from disappearing for night-mode users (23.x & 25.x).
SAK-51863 adds tag-validation checks that flag inappropriate language as teams curate shared vocabularies, an easy win for maintaining professional resource libraries (23.x & 25.x).
SAK-52068 hides Turnitin Content Review options when the submission type is “External Tool,” reducing the chance of a misconfigured assignment that never delivers papers to Turnitin (25.x only).
SAK-51993 wraps notification titles in additional UTF-8 protection, stopping garbled characters before they reach inboxes or mobile push alerts (25.x only).

Looking Ahead

If you are already running 25.x, these fixes arrive via the October maintenance release. Institutions on 23.x will see the shared highlights in the next quarterly patch bundle—consider the 25.x-only updates above as conversation starters if you’re weighing an upgrade window. As always, if you’d like help sequencing your deployments or backport priorities, just reach out and we’ll co-plan the rollout with you.