I was attempting to import questions using the blackboard 5 type that a faculty member was having problems with and the import was silently dying during the process. After turning on debugging I saw that the question->name field was simply too big >255 for the field in the database. I fixed that in the code by truncating the name to 254 characters. Also in this patch I check to see if the questions are already in HTML encoded format, and if so, I re-interpret the HTML entities so that things like ৻ are the actual character rather than code when printed to the screen. Attached is a test case and my patch.