Restricted Reply for users

Restricted Reply for users

by Bill Steele -
Number of replies: 13

I have set up a forum and added several discussions and forced the subscription of all users. All appeared well but when I added additional discussions the users were not given the Reply option and I can't find a way to provide this despite my best efforts

Bill

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Re: Restricted Reply for users

by Jeffrey Borrowdale -
I'm having the same trouble. When logged in as "teacher" everything looks fine, but when I log in as a user, there are no reply buttons to some of the forums and when I click the "Forums" link to see all the forms, they show up as solid black letters instead of underlined blue hyperlinks.

I clicked the editing hand to make sure they were set to allow topics and replies and didn't set a time limit of any kind for posting. Any ideas?

Jeffrey Borrowdale
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Re: Restricted Reply for users

by Bill Steele -
I managed to get a workaround. I created a dummy user, set the forum to allow topic creation from users, logged in as the dummy user, created a topic. This appears to work
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Re: Restricted Reply for users

by Roberto Seoane -

The problem is when teacher creates the forum and the topic. User cannot reply teacher's topic.

I have this problem too. My users are in groups and they can post without problems, but not reply to my posts.

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Re: Restricted Reply for users

by Jim Proctor -
I also discovered the absence of a Reply button today, as pointed out by my students in response to a new forum I established this AM. Seems not to matter how I adjust the forum settings. This is the first time this has happened to me. I'm running Moodle 1.5 dev (2004111700) which may explain this in part, though if it's a bug it's a big bug.

Ideas?

Thanks,

Jim P.
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Re: Restricted Reply for users

by Graham Blacker -

We had this 'problem'. The setting for the course was to force separate groups and we had not assigned students to groups. Changed the setting to 'no groups' and the magical return of the reply button.

Graham

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Re: Restricted Reply for users

by Max Stenlund -
We have the same problem but seem to occur when students are reassigned to a new group. Does that make sense? T
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Re: Restricted Reply for users

by Sylvie Kasztan -
I just ran into the same problem today and can't seem to find a way around it while keeping my group setting intact. . .Settings for the course is to force separate groups. I did assign students to groups. Since my students will be working in blocks, this is an aspect of the forum that is rather important.  Has anyone found a solution as of yet?  Suggestions. . .? Help. . .
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Re: Restricted Reply for users

by Martin Dougiamas -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers
This is not a bug, as far as I know, it's just that the logic of groups in forums is necessarily complex to handle forums that change modes or people that change groups.

The rule for a forum in groups mode is:  students can only reply to discussions started by people in their own group. Read that again. smile  Any discussion that someone starts is marked as belonging to their group.

One exception is for an editing teacher who can look at different groups. In this case, the group id of any discussion they start is set to whatever group they are looking at at that time. Thus, a teacher can post "into" different groups to seed discussions.

A teacher can also post a single announcement-type discussion to ALL groups (what we call group zero), but in this case students can not reply to it. Why? Because then students from different groups will be mixed together in the same discussion, and this causes all sorts of visibility problems later on if the forum or groups should change. 

(If you need to mix people together then just don't use groups for that forum!)
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Re: Restricted Reply for users

by Przemyslaw Stencel -

Martin, I think this thread shows something important - that quite a few people find this behaviour not intuitive. In fact some of my teachers fell into the same 'trap' - they posted a message to a grouped forum and the students could not reply.

What do you think about changing the default behaviour? If a forum is grouped and the teacher posts to "All participants", the message would be automatically multiplied and posted to all groups. Not only is this more intuitive (IMHO - what do others think?), but it also makes it much easier for the teacher to post a message to all groups - s/he doesn't have to post the message n times.

What do you think?

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Re: Restricted Reply for users

by Martin Dougiamas -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers
I remember considering that, but at the time the problem of re-editing these multiple copies all seemed a bit too hard that afternoon.   smile    Also, will it be more/less confusing for a teacher to suddenly see 6 listed copies of their new discussion?

Currently I tend to agree with you that multiple copies might make more sense from a user point of view ... perhaps it just needs to be explained clearly on the posting screen in that situation.
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Re: Restricted Reply for users

by Przemyslaw Stencel -
perhaps it just needs to be explained clearly on the posting screen in that situation.

That would doapprove. Even if the behaviour doesn't get changed, a simple warning (in red, bold type?) just after the heading saying "Your new discussion topic" would remove the possibility of confusion. Something along these lines:

"You are posting your message in 'All participants' mode. Please note that students who are assigned to groups will not be able to reply to it." And maybe some short explanation how to post so that students can reply.

Is this what you meant?
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Re: Restricted Reply for users

by Martin Dougiamas -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers
Either we keep the current behaviour and add a message explaining it, or change the behaviour to produce multiple copies that need to be separately edited, and add a new message that explains that.

What do the usability experts think?  wink
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Re: Restricted Reply for users

by Slobodan Jovcic -
Well, few of my instructors just got bitten by this. I say let's produce multiple copies.
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