Yes, unless it is not a news forum, a student should see the blue link, "Unsubscribe from this forum" if he/she is already subscribed. By clicking on it he/she would stop getting emails of the future posts.
If your students are complaining about the mail volume, ask them to consider activating the e-mail digest option in in their profile. This will create a single e-mail each day. This digest e-mail will contain all the contributions posted to the forums that they subscribe to and can be browsed at their leisure. Our system has been configured so that a digest is generated each day for users with this option at 5 p.m.
The daily digest is a good option. I suggested that all my students do this...in fact, I changed the default setting in the database to make this the default in the students profile. However, when students get daily email digest, then there is no way (that I am aware of) to get an immediate message to all students email addresses, without emailing them individually.
This past winter, I taught some off-campus classes and would post messages to the news forum on the day of class that I wanted to make sure all students got immediatley..."snowing and I'm not going to be there...", but with daily digests, students didn't get those messages in their email until after the class meeting time.
I've been working on a hack to allow teachers to send emails to all students, but don't have it working the way I want yet. Not sure if a means to email all students or groups of students is something that will be in 1.5.
I do like the way 1.5 is shaping up....some really nice enhancements.
Steve
It's in CVS/contrib for both 1.4 and 1.5.
Thanks Michael. I'm using the latest stable version 1.4.4 that I've downloaded and installed. I normally just download the latest stable version and upgrade manually. I looked in the modules and add ons and don't see this module there. Is it only available through CVS?
Steve
Okay, I downloaded TortoiseCVS and used it to download the quickmail directory from CVS. I read your "readme" file and it says to "install as a block".
I copied the entire quickmail directory into my blocks directory then visited the admin page, but I get the following error:
Block quickmail: /home/xxxxxx/public_html/teacher/blocks/
quickmail/block_quickmail.php was not readable
I guess I'm just not sure how to install a block. I know there are subdirectories in quickmail (db, email, lang), but I'm not sure if I should be copying them some place else? Any help would be appreciated.
By the way, the CVS contrib is great.......lots of cool stuff there to experiment with.
Steve
--S
In the 1.4 version, in the quickmail folder, there is a folder called blocks. Inside that folder is a folder called email. Put the email folder in your folder.
There is also a folder called lang, inside of that is a folder called en, and inside of that is a file:block_quickmail.php. Put that file in the en folder inside your lang folder.
Then visit admin.
For 1.5, the install is pretty much the same, except instead of email the actual block folder is called quickmail.
Thanks Michael...that worked great! A much nicer interface than what I had hacked together. This is a really useful block.
On a side note, I'm using the 1.4 version and there were a couple of db folders in there...that's what was confusing me a little the other day...I didn't know what to do with them.
Steve
The db folder in the blocks folder was a mistake, I just took it out of CVS, thanks for pointing that out!
There should be a db folder inside the email folder (blocks/email/db).
Hi Steve
How did you make this the default setting for students? We have an open forum which students use to discuss issues of their choice at present every time someone posts it send an e-mail to the whole school. I like the idea of one mail per day.
Steve,
Change the default value in the mdl_user table for maildigest...I believe it's originally set to 0....change it to 1. This will only impact new accounts it won't change existing accounts.
Great thanks for your help. I'll try it now.
Steve