Hi,
After resetting lot of courses for this new academic year, i saw that logs where not deleted, before the new course start date (or the moment i made the reset). Really, a teacher said it to me, and asked that i delete these old logs.
After digging, i see it's indicated in the course reset documentation, and it's the case since Moodle 2.7.1 (via MDL-43274).
But it seems that the decision to keep logs (not delete them) when resetting a course was taken without much more discussion about that.
Let me try to explain why i think it's not always a good solution :
- As someone explained in MDL-43274 comments, it could allow some new teacher in a course to see what was done before he's in (for a new semester/year)
- It takes lot of place in Moodle's internal DB
- it then generate bigger backup files (when including logs)
- if your server miss disk place (because of logs, in DB/backups), the recommandation is generally to lower the time before deleting logs (globally) by the dedicated scheduled task. But the problem is that it then implies to delete all logs for all courses.
- if you know that a semester (or year) ended, and you made good backups (with logs) corresponding at this ended period of time (or course by course, or the whole plateform), you can delete corresponding logs in live platform for these courses
- that would allow to keep only current logs for current semester courses, and also to keep indefinitly (or 1000 days) logs for other specials courses you don't want to lose logs (or have them spliced in several backups).
What i think should be done :
- create a new capability (something like moodle/course:resetlogs ?) allowing to delete logs when reseting a course
- the risk (that was the base to open MDL-43274) would be a teacher deleting logs, with impossibility to understand what happened before
- so this capability should be unset for teachers, but would allow administrator (and managers ?) to deletes logs when resetting courses.
That would allow Administrator to delete these (old) logs (with benefits it can make), and keep security about teachers actions (with benefits it can have).
What others think about that?
Séverin