Forum notification improvements

Forum notification improvements

by Andrew Lyons -
Number of replies: 3
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I'm currently looking to address a number of issues we've identified with forum notifications. The issues that we've identified all relate to the volume of e-mail generated by the Moodle forums.

One of these will hopefully be addressed in MDL-39707 with introduction of per-thread subscription.

Force Subscribe forums

We make a lot of use forums in a force-subscribe mode. This is because we want to ensure that students receive notifications for some forums. We therefore want all students to be forcibly enrolled.

However... some of our staff also want to receive notifications, whilst others don't. Most often this can be accomplished by using different roles for different types of staff (e.g. Teaching staff vs. Administrative staff), but often we have many members of teaching staff and not all of them want to receive notifications.

This is currently handled using a capability - mod/forum:allowforcesubscribe (introduced in MDL-33166).

Anyone with this capability is forcibly subscribed to the forum, whilst anyone without the capability cannot subscribe.

We'd like to propose introduction of an additional capability - mod/forum:allowforceunsubscribe to allow certain roles to unsubscribe from forum notifications.

I've raised MDL-40483 to propose the introduction of this new capability.

Per-Forum Digest settings

The final area we've identified for improvement is that of the volume of e-mail for forums where a user is interested in the content.

At present, it is possible to choose how to receive forum notifications with three options:

  • No Digest - single e-mail per forum post
  • Digest Complete - a daily digest with the full post details
  • Digest Subjects - a daily digest with the post subject only

We're proposing that this be changed to a per-forum setting with fall back to a per-user preference so that users can have a default setting, and override this on a per-forum basis.

This change was raised in MDL-4908 may years ago but has not been addressed to date. I've written a brief specification of the changes in http://docs.moodle.org/dev/mod_forum-subscriptions.

Summary

I would really appreciate any feedback that people have for the new capability introduction, and the per-forum digest setting.

Thanks in advance,

Andrew

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In reply to Andrew Lyons

Re: Forum notification improvements

by Mark Andrews -

Hi Andrew,

I agree with and can totally identify with this issue - so think it's a great idea! my only concern would be that with all this flexibility users may get confused as to what forums or threads they are subscribed to. So be missing out on posts that they feel they should be getting and vice versa.

So perhaps along with the capability we would need to design an easy to use centralised interface for each user that displayed their forums (or groups of forums) along with their subscription settings and then ideally allow them to manage them from there.

Regards

Mark

 

 

 

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In reply to Mark Andrews

Re: Forum notification improvements

by Andrew Lyons -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers

Hi Mark,

Thanks for the feedback.

At present, I don't believe that there is a centralised list of all forums across all courses that you're enrolled in and have available to you, but we do have one on a per-course basis. I'd love to make a holistic view of that course page, and we'll have to look into this in terms of performance to see whether it is feasible or whether there is a better solution that we haven't considered.

Although I've not included it on the screenshot in the subscription proposal (http://docs.moodle.org/dev/mod_forum-subscriptions), I was hoping to include the options there too so you can see both your subscription status, and your digest status. Where applicable (e.g. you have the appropriate capabilities), you'd be able to control these settings too.

Do you feel that these address your concerns?

Thanks,

Andrew

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In reply to Andrew Lyons

Re: Forum notification improvements

by Mark Andrews -

Hi Andrew,

I'm really sorry I missed your reply! I think I posted in July and then floated away- I guess this is a use case where something like what you have proposed would be useful!

Not sure if i'm too late to give feedback now but.....yep I think that you have proposed would go some way to settling my concerns.

However I do think a site level view of this looking across my subscriptions across all my courses would be really useful.

Regards

Mark

 

 

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