With time, I plan to add some thoughts to the Tracker Item that will help support this feature request. In this discussion, let's see if anyone else has any ideas. The "Forum" activity, I believe, is the only activity where Moodle will modify its name in the grade book, so this problem really is a bit "odd."
So, if you simply change that string in the language customization (string identifier: gradeitemnameforrating ) then you could take that prepended wording out and leave just the forum name. (Or change it to some other shorter wording. )
The only downside could be if that phrase is also used somewhere else in the forum itself, and you want to preserve the wording in that case, but not in the gradebook. It would be interesting to change this string and see where else it does appear. Judging by its string identifier name, it looks like it is specific for this gradebook item name.
Randy
I really like the idea that I shared above about Moodle having a "short name" for any activity that gets put into the grade book. If the short name is left blank, then the long name is used. But there are some possible problems with this approach. 1) It's a lot of programming, 2) It's another field, and some people already complain about too many fields, and 3) It takes a little more space when editing an activity.
Where else exactly does this string show up outside the gradebook item?
There's several strings related to the various places forum names show up. The one for "Rating grade for {forum name}" (gradeitemnameforrating) is the one for the grade items. The word "Rating" is a different string and shows up in a few other strings too as part of the phrase. So changing this would not affect those other strings.
The string in the grading item name is specific to just that one place as far as I can tell. When I grep the Moodle code, it shows me this string is only ever used once (mod/forum/lib.php line 882) : when creating / update the grade item name. It doesn't occur elsewhere in the forum itself.
Thanks Jason for your feedback. Good to hear that customising the language string works for new forums.
I think you're right about the name not changing because the grade item already exists i.e. it is the expected outcome.
Did you ever figure out a way to refresh the cache? I'm in the same spot as you are. I've edited the two strings in my language file
-- Rating grade for = gradeitemnameforrating | Rating grade for {$a->name}
-- Whole forum grade for = gradeitemnameforwholeforum | Whole forum grade for {$a->name}
But Moodle won't pick them up for pre-existing activities. From Helen's response, this is 'as expected' but this seems different from other Language behavior where I can make a change and it effects the entire site.
@ Andrew: Thanks for giving me a hint as to why these language strings strings are different.
-Josh
This is a bit different to the usual language string changes in that these are used as the initial value when you create a grade item. The new language string will take effect if you create a new forum, but existing ones are not changed automatically. You can, of course, manually update them.
It is the same as the default name for the "Announcements" forum, and a few other places.
It will be in the main en language pack. The en_us pack is a "child" language pack that only holds the various differences from the standard "parent" pack, en (with its many misspellings our former British masters still quaintly persist in using ;)
Rick,
You've likely already figured it out by now but if you haven't, make sure you select all of the components you want the search to apply to (i.e. click in the "core" and hit hit command-A on your keyboard for select all).
-Josh
In the show strings area, scroll down to the 'mod' section and choose forum.php
Usually, I just select ALL the component names when searching for something, since a string may sometimes be in a different component that you might expect.
More suggestions? Am I not entering the string correctly?
Thanks much! This did it.
Thanks Jason for creating MDL-70379 for improving the forum activity grade item name.
For anyone not watching the issue, I commented there about realising from reading this discussion that a simple improvement would be to change the English language strings gradeitemnameforrating and gradeitemnameforwholeforum so that the name of the forum is first:
{$a->name} rating grade
{$a->name} whole forum grade
It is really great to be able to modify one's language pack for these kinds of adjustments. But getting the default wording "correct" is also important. As a simply modification to what you suggest, I would remove the word "grade" since when looking at the grade book, "grade" is already implied. Also, other activities, such as quizzes and assignments, do not append the word "grade" to the grade book heading. So maybe something like the following would work:
{$a->name} Rating
{$a->name} Whole Forum
or perhaps with a dash.
{$a->name} -Rating
{$a->name} -Whole Forum
And that leads me back to the tracker request to append/prepend nothing unless it is necessary for clarification in a case where both rating and whole forum grading is utilized.
The term rating and whole forum grading have little/no purchase with our students - so maybe this goes to Rick's idea of a gradebook alias for an activity. What would be a use case for both rating and whole forum grading? Maybe something like the workshop where you want one method for peer assessment and one method for instructor assessment. Well, having those appear in the gradebook as "Reading Discussion - Rating Grade" and "Reading Discussion - Whole Forum Grade" is still confusing; students can probably reason it out from context, but if you could apply/edit the name in the gradebook to be "Reading Discussion - Peer Grade" that would allow for maximum clarity.
Very good point, Jason. Maybe they should both be blank by default.
I am not sure how many instructors would use both a Rating and a Whole Forum grade. To me, it would seem like it is one or the other. But I might be wrong. However, if an instructor (maybe a newbie) were to use both, then they would see what would appear as two identical grade book items for the forum activity. And the only way for an instructor to fix this would be to contact their Moodle administrator and request a Language Pack change.
Rick,
We ended up rolling with:
{$a->name} [Rating]
{$a->name} [WholeForum]
If you use parenthesis, Moodle wants to make it an emoji . I realize is poor design for accessibility, but doing so mitigates text wrapping display issues.
Thanks Rick for your suggested improvements to the language strings. I have removed the word 'grade' from gradeitemnameforrating and gradeitemnameforwholeforum.