Blocking certain students from messaging is causing them to show up as participants in all courses

Blocking certain students from messaging is causing them to show up as participants in all courses

by Dominic Bond -
Number of replies: 8
By default our students have access to the messenger. Around 8 students are banned from its use. To enable that I have assigned them in a system context to a variant of the student (called student-no messenger) that has the appropriate boxes ticked.

The problem is that these students show up as "participants" in all courses as if they have enroled. This has not been too much of an issue until now. Next week we will be working with the year 7 student council to allow them editing right (teacher role) on a certain page. These year 7 students will see other students (those banned from messenger) in the participants list and see the sanctions against them. This is obviously a far from ideal situation.

I have tried numerous times to prevent this, for instance by giving them limited rights on the messenger block only, but this does not prevent them replying to messages.

Has anyone got any suggestions please smile
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In reply to Dominic Bond

Re: Blocking certain students from messaging is causing them to show up as participants in all courses

by Jon Witts -
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It sounds like your student-no-messenger role is at fault.

You need to have that role only prohibit the messenger settings and have everything else set to inherit. If you copied the student role then tweaked the messenger settings this is why it is happening.

Make a new empty role and set the messenger tweaks to prohibit. Then apply this role to the students you do not want to use messenger at the site level.

Hope this makes sense! wink

If it works would you consider posting the settings you set to do this? It would make a nice guide for the docs...
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In reply to Dominic Bond

Re: Blocking certain students from messaging is causing them to show up as participants in all courses

by Paul Fynn -

Glad to see you hitting this issue before we do (We'll delegate some Moodle space to our student association after the break).

Instinctively I am against putting a student straight into a teacher role. My own preference would be to define a new role(s) (Student Manager, Student non-editing Manager) and limit that role to keep them out of general site privileges (eg Site Notes).

The roles can be redefined locally on the course pages you give them to allow them the equivalent, but not same, rights as a teacher would normally have.

Make any sense?

Paul

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In reply to Paul Fynn

Re: Blocking certain students from messaging is causing them to show up as participants in all courses

by ben reynolds -
The role is not the only problem. Dominic says, "I have assigned them in a system context to a variant of the student (called student-no messenger) that has the appropriate boxes ticked."

People assigned to system or site-wide roles appear in every classroom. However, when assigning a system role, you'll notice an eye between the role on the left and the list of everyone in the system on the right. This allows you to assign a hidden system role. The hidden people are visible to teachers and such, but not to students.

Thus, you would be wise to make the year 7 editors some variant of student with editing privilege, per Paul's advice.

But, Dominic, I'm not convinced of the wisdom of putting miscreants into every classroom on your system.
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In reply to ben reynolds

Re: Blocking certain students from messaging is causing them to show up as participants in all courses

by Jon Witts -
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OK, so here is what I meant:
  • go to Administration >Users >Permissions >Define roles
  • Add new role
  • Leave legacy role type as none
  • set moodle/site:sendmessage to prohibit
  • save this role
Now assign this role at the system level to the 'miscreants' and they should no longer be able to use the messaging system; whilst still be only enrolled on the courses they should be.

My understanding was that these students were not meant to be appearing in every course at all...

-- edit --

Ah OK - now I see the point of hidden system role! Should have read that last paragraph a bit closer! wink
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In reply to Jon Witts

Re: Blocking certain students from messaging is causing them to show up as participants in all courses

by Helen Foster -
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Please note that only users with the capability moodle/course:view are listed as course participants. Thus, it's not necessary to assign a hidden role if only messaging permissions are set.
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In reply to Helen Foster

Re: Blocking certain students from messaging is causing them to show up as participants in all courses

by Dominic Bond -

Thank you for your replies on this.  I have followed through and sorted the problem.

I also tried to apply the same principles to our parental guest login.  We have informed our parents that they may login to Moodle using a simple login and have guest access throughout.  To enable this we have added "parent" to the guest profile.  This works fine for the parent, but similar to above "parent" shows up as a participlant in all courses.

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In reply to Dominic Bond

Re: Blocking certain students from messaging is causing them to show up as participants in all courses

by Jon Witts -
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If you follow Helen's advice and remove the capability she mentioned from your parent guest role (you did create a new role didn't you?) then they should not appear in the course listing.
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In reply to Jon Witts

Re: Blocking certain students from messaging is causing them to show up as participants in all courses

by Dominic Bond -
I think I understand what you and Helen are saying. If I turn off "course view" for parental guests they do not show up in the participants list (which is good), but they also cannot view most courses (which is undesired).

Hope I am making sense.
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