Forum

Hi,
I had instructed my teachers to setup groups within a course and add a forum in "separate groups" mode as way to maintain private conversations within a given group. For instance, to discuss topics (and share files) for a team assigment. I insisted in the private nature of the "separate groups" setting in the forum (within a wider course).

But, we have discovered that individual messages of those "private" forums can be accessed and readed by other non-group members. There a te two "holes":
a) The personal information page: you can see (and read) recent messages sent by a user. Even messages to a forum you cannot acces.

b) The search forums utility: again, the results will show posts from "separate" forums.

In either case, if a non-member user want to acces the whole thread, Moodle emits and error message indicating that you do not have right to acces that forum. But individual messages as displayed. If a keyword is quite used, almost the whole thread is accessible.

Some teachers at my site think that Moodle should not even mention the existence of those messages to non-member users. They see this behaviour as a "privacy" breackage. One complains that some students have "stolen" files from other groups in this way.

I feel that this behavior comes from the social constructivist philosophy of Moodle, but I cannot force all my teachers into that view.

I would like to ask your opinions on this topic. Is this a feature or a bug?. Perhaps it would be possible to add a setting to modify the behaviour (as it is or no report at all) on teacher option. Should I report this as a bug in moodle bugtracker, or as a feature request?.

- Enrique -