I submitted this to the bug tracker several months ago as bug 2714 but have yet to see any response to it. I absolutely do not want to use the new site policy as it is because it forces guests to agree to a policy-this is totally unnecessary because guests aren't allowed to do anything but look and it simply will scare them off having to agree to a bunch of irrelevant rules just to poke around a site-this new feature is a kiss of death to a site imho.
I've looked at the file user/policy.php but can't figure out how to hack it to simply bypass this if the user is a guest. Any advice on how to do this would be appreciated.
And I wonder, if Google comes to a site, does this site policy mean that it will reach a dead end and not be able to crawl the site? One would hope not.
You missed my point. I want to have a site policy, but it is irrelevant to guests, because they can't do anything that the policy covers. Try entering test.moodle.com as a guest, and you will be asked to agree to the site policy. This is the sort of thing I don't want happening. It's rather draconian and will scare off potential users who just want to browse first.
It is very hard (indeed impossible) for me to imagine a situation where asking guests to agree to a site policy makes much sense. Isn't the whole idea behind making users agree to a site policy is that the agreement to a site policy allows the administrators to impose sanctions on abusers without being subject to complaints that the abusers were not given fair warning about abuse? Since guest users are anonymous, there is no way there is no way to associate any abuse with a particular user. Surely if one is worried about abuse by guest users, the sensible thing to do would be to disallow guest access to all or part of the site. What am I missing?
While it's called a site policy it may be used for other things. A couple of examples that come to mind where you may want to allow guests in:
1. General warning message - Content that may not be suitable for some users - graphic pictures, language warnings, "we're a racist/sexist/cat-loving/dog-hating organisation so please do not enter if you are easily offended", etc.
2. Disclaimer messages - 'while every care has been taken to ensure information is correct and up-to-date we take no responsibility ... bla bla bla" (for example http://test.moodle.com)
Just want to make it flexible enough to work for everyone.
1. General warning message - Content that may not be suitable for some users - graphic pictures, language warnings, "we're a racist/sexist/cat-loving/dog-hating organisation so please do not enter if you are easily offended", etc.
2. Disclaimer messages - 'while every care has been taken to ensure information is correct and up-to-date we take no responsibility ... bla bla bla" (for example http://test.moodle.com)
Just want to make it flexible enough to work for everyone.
Hej Jeffery,
For further information I need to brag about this one.
Art retrieved these singing horses from the best
Swedish site award winner Swedish National Television.
You'll need to set audio to on and then click on the each
singer to get them going. 'Finish, I've had enough' is 'Avsluta'
(down to the right) in Swedish. I think the choir is called the
Real Group. BTW there's no policy but everyone being invited
to a free concert. You can make your own Flash choir concert
introduction for your site with Tony Hursh's contribution WhickerBill.
I changed the subject title... one could simply make the site policy sound less draconian if one doesn't want to scare off potential customers.
A suggestion to make this more flexible: could we make it more like the maintenance mode? The site policy is only displayed to new users if the admin placed a file userpolicy.html in Moodle's dataroot.
Some advantages:
- It sounds unnecessary to me, but that way you can put up several files. That way guestpolicy.html would be a policy which is displayed for guests explaining how no (singing) horses were harmed during the production of the site. Userpolicy.html could then include a policy for users (You're not allowed to drink Baccardi visiting the themes forum etc...)
- If you don't want a site policy, the guest policy page could still be used to display a message to guest users encouraging them to sign up.
- This can easily be expanded to include mentors, parents, ... once we have roles in Moodle. I can imagine a different site policy being displayed to, for instance, outside visitors wishing to access a student's portfolio.
- This solution doesn't clutter up the configuration screen (BTW, Thanks for the tabs in that screen.) with two more options.
Some disadvantages:
(to be summed up by others)
Jan-I still don't want a guest policy, but it would be nice if there were separate policies for different courses. I think the policy that would apply to a free and open course on my site should differ from the policy for a paid course. If you have a troublemaker in a free course, you just kick them out (and I've got a nice little hack to keep them out if anyone is interested, send me a private message), but a paid course, where they have paid money, might require a statement about refund policies. And for paid courses, shouldn't the policy be presented before they pay, so they know what they are putting their money down on?
I wonder whether it is possible to have a better name than policy to cover other uses of this feature.
If we keep it on the site level, then using the switches without GUI (that is setting cfg variables directly in site config) could be an alternative to Moodle checking always for presence of files. I like the flexibility the files approach offers but I don't quite see how this can be easily handled through the interface in terms of maintaining those files. Unless this is handled in the fashion of languages.
Also, when we drop to the level of courses, which I see useful for some sites, there must also be a link on each course page allowing users to inspect the policy (of the course and/or the site) at any time not only when they sign on first time. This can be handled as a resource individually but would probably be better to have it automated.
Site news is part of the home page (course 1), so I gather its policy will follow whether there is public access to that page or not. A short news-specific policy can be written in the forum description which shows each time the forum is openned.
If we keep it on the site level, then using the switches without GUI (that is setting cfg variables directly in site config) could be an alternative to Moodle checking always for presence of files. I like the flexibility the files approach offers but I don't quite see how this can be easily handled through the interface in terms of maintaining those files. Unless this is handled in the fashion of languages.
Also, when we drop to the level of courses, which I see useful for some sites, there must also be a link on each course page allowing users to inspect the policy (of the course and/or the site) at any time not only when they sign on first time. This can be handled as a resource individually but would probably be better to have it automated.
Site news is part of the home page (course 1), so I gather its policy will follow whether there is public access to that page or not. A short news-specific policy can be written in the forum description which shows each time the forum is openned.
For me, the idea of having a policy to agree to simply to receive site news by email is ridiculous. So are you saying that currently if all one does is register for site news one is required to agree to the same policy as someone who might be enrolled in a course at the site has to agree to?
How about modifying user/policy.php to look something like this:
if (file_exists("..../localpolicy.php")) {
include("..../localpolicy.php");
} else {
current code goes here
}
together with a configuration option about whether or not to show guests the site policy (which would apply only in the else{} part).
Hence if anybody wants to do something fancy with their site policy, they can program just about anything they like in their localpolicy.php.
if (file_exists("..../localpolicy.php")) {
include("..../localpolicy.php");
} else {
current code goes here
}
together with a configuration option about whether or not to show guests the site policy (which would apply only in the else{} part).
Hence if anybody wants to do something fancy with their site policy, they can program just about anything they like in their localpolicy.php.
Thanks! Your change worked perfectly for what I want to do. Disable the site policy for guests. Also I did not see an answer, does google bot get hung up and cannot browse the site if a site policy is in place? Anyway, I like the idea of having a separate optional guest site policy. Thanks again.