Post new forum topic by email?

Post new forum topic by email?

by Paul King -
Number of replies: 2

Is there any way for a user to post a new topic to a Moodle forum by email?

I understand a user can reply to an existing topic notification by email, but some of my users will not participate or engage with forums if there is a requirement to log in every time they want to ask a question.

Also it there a way to allocate a topic category to a post made by email?

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In reply to Paul King

Re: Post new forum topic by email?

by Andrew Lyons -
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Hi Paul,

At this time it is not possible to create a new forum post via e-mail, only to reply to them. It wouldn't be too challenging to add this functionality, however the reason that we did not do so was down to several reasons:

  1. A unique address is required for each forum. Therefore the user would have to log into Moodle and find the address in order to use it in their e-mail client in the first place. Unless they create new posts to the same forum on a regular basis, it's a very unusual approach to creating content;
  2. The unique address would have to be displayed for each user somewhere within the UI. For a vast majority of users it's really just noise and unimportant. We do so in a handful of other locations (private files for example), but most other uses of the inbound mail feature are intended for replying to e-mails that a user receives;
  3. Related to my first point, it would become harder for the user to manage the list of randomly generated addresses in a meaningful fashion, and I suspect that we would likely see reports and complaints where people have sent content to the wrong location accidentally. Therefore I would say that there is a large usability and user experience issue to solve here too.

I suspect that we would accept a patch implementing this if it could solve all of the relevant issues, though the use-case is very minimal and I personally would be not support such a feature.

Hope this clarifies,

Andrew

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In reply to Andrew Lyons

Re: Post new forum topic by email?

by Paul King -
Thanks Andrew - that sounds like it might be a 'nail in the coffin' for Moodle from my use case perspective.
I have only one forum and thus one email address that I would want this functionality for, which mostly addresses any confusion or management issues - but I am not a coder and would not know how to create and submit a plugin or patch even for a single forum use case.

Essentially I need a way to duplicate email list functionality such that email only users can participate on a reasonably equal footing alongside logged in web browser users in this one forum - and with something resembling real time speed.

Yahoo Groups did some of this for us, until Yahoo pulled the plug, and a decade's worth of data was essentially lost. No backup method is or was available to Yahoo users that retained integrity of database with threads and attachment relationships.

Lesson learned, and keen not to be held hostage by a third party service again.

Any opensource suggestions that might allow mail list back to back with conventional online forum functionality -  ideally that can run ok on a shared host (for around 600 subscribers, seldom than a few active users on any given day), would be most appreciated...
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