Hi @james_imsimbi! Tutor users must be able to connect to Atlas clusters, and the fact that the “mongodb+srv” connection string is not supported is considered as a bug – either in Tutor, Open edX or both.
I was not aware of this syntax, which is documented here: https://developer.mongodb.com/article/srv-connection-strings If I understand correctly, with “mongodb+srv” the server addresses are seeded from SRV DNS records.
We could easily modify the mongodb connection strings for the forums, but this change would not affect the connection string used in the LMS and CMS (in edx-platform). These apps use the pymongo library, for which the “mongodb+srv” syntax is supported: mongo_client – Tools for connecting to MongoDB — PyMongo 3.11.2 documentation
However, this new syntax requires that the MongoClient is instantiated by a single URI string. This is not the case in edx-platform: edx-platform/mongo_utils.py at 3c3e35e0f8f6e2d4093bd0175b318c296980a967 · edx/edx-platform · GitHub
It might be possible to redefine the “host” constructor argument in Tutor: tutor/common_all.py at 0f1dbf0ba59e6cd3d77cfb0ba86db6866bf2624e · overhangio/tutor · GitHub
If this does not work, we would have to make a change upstream, in edx-platform.
Unfortunately I do not have access to an Atlas cluster and I do not have the time to implement this change myself. Would you like to attempt making the change yourself? If not, this is typically the kind of change that would be the subject of a consulting contract (for which I would be available).