Improving Forums

Improving Forums

by Reploid Cage -
Number of replies: 6

Hello,

I would like to ask about a way to limit the maximum posts for my students inside the forums. I need a way to know how many posts they are using in a certain period (day or month) and have an option to put a limit so they cannot use more than "X" amount of posts in a day, week or month. I also need to check for how many posts have made all the users inside the forums (teachers and students) to be able to grade them. Im sure some of you may had the same problem.

I tryied to install Forum plus plugin wich is supposed to do give me thoe options but i couldnt install it (i cannot install any plug in and i couldnt found any tuttorial for plugins installing). I unzipped it into the server/moodle/mod folder and got the forumtt folder created. The problem was that i couldnt actually see the new activity module when i entered into moodle with my admin account. So, if anybody can help me to understand what am i doing wrong i would apreciatte it. (maybe somebody can recomend another plugin to acomplish the limit posting thing i talk about before and teach me how to install it.)

Well Thanks a lot for your answers

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In reply to Reploid Cage

Re: Improving Forums

by Peter Ritter -
when you enter moodle with your admin account, you have to click on the Notifications button on the left. then the new module is "installed" automaticly and you can see it under modules->activities
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In reply to Peter Ritter

Re: Improving Forums

by Reploid Cage -

Thanks a lot Peter!

Actually i didnt do that before (how could i forget? sad). Well now that its installed i got another problem. I had every step marked as succes during the auto-install of Forum plus, but now that I try to use it as an activity inside one of my courses it doesnt let me do so. After i fill the formulary (forum name, description, maximu file size of upload, etc) and press the button to create it it throws me this error:

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@mydomain.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Apache/1.3.37 Server at www.matworld.cl Port 80
So i would really apreciatte if anybody can help me to figure out what could be hapening. Maybe some of you had the same problem before.
Thanks a lot
PS: I also noticed that some sections of forum plus are unnamed. For example: If you have it in activities, its is called modulenameplural, or in the module section even when its called Forumtt when you enter into the settings it is called modulename. Anyways its not that hard to understand it so i just wanted to quote it in case this means i did something wrong about the instalation.
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In reply to Reploid Cage

Re: Improving Forums

by Jon Bolton -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Testers
Not sure about some of your technical issues in your last post, but any text surrounded by xxx means that the language pack is missing or incomplete.

But... the standard Forum module in the core release already has the ability to limit the maximum posts for students in v1.6 and above. There are options in the Forum Settings which allow users to be blocked from posting after a given number of posts in a given period, and as they approach that number, they'll be warned that they are approaching the threshold.
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In reply to Jon Bolton

Re: Improving Forums

by Reploid Cage -

Thanks a lot for your answer Jon.

I tried to use the blocking settup inside the forums (i have the version 1.7 latest). The thing is that, for example: I ask it to warn the users about they being using 2 posts, then i asked to block the user when the posts reached to 2 (to prevent mayor-posting from one single user). My new problema is that it isnt working. I created a student account and he can post over 5 times without getting any notification via email (even when i run cron.php) and of course, the most important, he doesnt get blocked so he can post as many discussions and inside topics posts as he wants. Maybe somebody could help me to understand how to use it correctly or what am i doing wrong, please.

Thanks in advance for all your help guys.

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In reply to Reploid Cage

Re: Improving Forums

by Evan ODonnell -
Hello - I am having the same issue! I'm setting the blockafter threshold to 5, the warn to 4 and the period to one day. The message that "this forum has been limited to the number of forum postings..." appears at the top, however students are free to post as many messages as they want. Am I missing something?
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In reply to Evan ODonnell

Re: Improving Forums

by Jay Sherman -
Does anyone know how to actually make the number of discussion show up. In the main page of my forum, it is listed at 0 for each discussion amount even though they have been discussions/postings. Please help.
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