Blocking New Posts to Forums

Blocking New Posts to Forums

by David Connolly -
Number of replies: 3

We've been upgraded to 1.9.8+ (from - I think - 1.6 something) and I've found an annoying omission.

It used to be easy to stop participants posting new contributions without closing down the forum - the tutors just selected 'No discussions, no replies' (see image) at the appropriate time. But now there doesn't seem to be any way to block new posts to a forum on a specific day at a specific time without having to edit permissions (which I really don't want the tutors to have to do). guiño

I've experimented with the "Time period for blocking" option, and get "This forum has a limit to the number of forum postings you can make in a given time period - this is currently set at 2 posting(s) in 1 day" at the top of the forum. But it's not clear from when the countdown starts.

"1 day" from when? One day from when the course is set up? From the moment the selection is made? From 12:01am on the day the selection is made? From when the forum is made visible to the participants? From when the first contribution is posted in that forum?

Does anyone happen to know? (I can find no guidelines in the documentation.)

Cheers,

David 

p.s. Now 'CTRL-Right arrow' makes the whole text jump to the right pensativo (rather than moving the cursor to next word, like it does in Word, for example). Is there any button I can press to go back to the way it was?

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In reply to David Connolly

Re: Blocking New Posts to Forums

by Teresa Gibbison -
Hi David
The appropriate way to stop users from participating is by overriding the permissions for that role on the specific forum. To stop student from posting discussions & replies to a forum follow these steps:
  1. Edit/update the specific forum
  2. Click the 'Override Permissions' tab
  3. Click 'Student' (or other role you would like to alter)
  4. Select the 'Prevent' radio button beside the following two capabilities
    1. Reply to posts [mod/forum:replypost]
    2. Start new discussions [mod/forum:startdiscussion]
  5. Save Changes
Note that this only changes the Student role's permissions for this particular forum, you can however following steps 2 - 5 from the Assign Roles page to override the permissions for all forums within the course.

I have shown our teaching staff how to do this so they can change the permissions to specific forums when required, rather than asking the administrator to do it every time.

Also note that It takes site permissions to be able to override roles. If you are not the Admin and cannot follow these steps your Administrator will need to provide your role with the 'Override Safe Permissions' capability.

Re your PS about CTRL-Right arrow: This also drives some of our users crazy. I find this only happens on some browsers like IE, it doesn't do it for me in Firefox.

Sorry for the long post, I hope it helps smile
Cheers
Teresa

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In reply to Teresa Gibbison

Re: Blocking New Posts to Forums

by David Connolly -

Many thanks, Teresa.

That's the way we've been handling it so far - I'd just prefer a method that doesn't involve giving tutors access to permissions (like we used to have with the older version). But I guess there isn't one.

It seems that in some cases, newer isn't always better. wink

And I guess no one has the answer to the question about the time blocking period. Never mind. I'll just have to experiment.

BTW: I'll try Firefox - thanks for the tip.

Best,

David

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In reply to David Connolly

Re: Blocking New Posts to Forums

by Anthony Borrow -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers
It seems like a reasonable request as it follows the idea of Available from/to and Viewable from/to that is used with the database module. Perhaps we could work this into the conditional activity functionality. There is currently the ability to set whether to hide completely or gray out before an activity is available. We could implement something similar with an option for after an activity is available to have a view only (no posting or add entries allowed). Making this type of behavior more consistent between the modules sounds like a good thing and perhaps something that can be worked toward in Moodle 2.1. I would encourage continued discussions on this and then making a feature request in the Moodle Tracker once there seems to be a clear idea of how we want this to work. Peace - Anthony
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