Dreamhost & Forums on Moodle

Dreamhost & Forums on Moodle

by Sherry Brown -
Number of replies: 6
I was wondering if other Moodlers out there on DreamHost have run into the Sender Quota Rejection? Using the Forums has been a nightmare as students are not receiving postings from the forums. The response from DreamHost is as follows:
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We have limits in place which determine the amount of
email that can be sent by any given email address.

For shell users sending email ( such as through php's mail(),
sendmail, mutt, your website, etc ) this limit is 200 messages
per hour.

For SMTP users who actually send from our SMTP servers
this limit is 100 messages per hour.

The amount of messages is determined by the To:, CC: BCC:
recipients. So a single email being sent to one person with nine CC
addresses
counts as 10 emails.

If you plan to use this account for bulk email purposes, we will
first need to ascertain that your usage is consistent with our anti-spam
policy,
which you can review here:

 http://www.dreamhost.com/spam.html

The most important aspects of this policy, which we would like you
to address, are:

1. Whether or not you have used an opt-in confirmation process
(not to be confused with regular 'opt-in') for all of your your list's
subscribers.
This is a process wherein each person who signs up for your list is sent
an email
after subscribing with a tagged link in it that they must click on before
being
added to the list. Those who do not click on the link are not added, and
receive no
further bulk email.

2. Whether you log each confirmation with the date/time and IP address
associated
with that confirmation.

3. Where we may go to independently review your opt-in confirmation
logging data.

Also, we would like to know where we may sign up for your mailing list in
order to
test out its opt-in confirmation functionality.
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The next response essentially said that an individual who creates an account, makes the email active and joins a course is NOT acceptable proof of opting in. I can't imagine how they can have Moodle as a one-click install then limit usage of a core component of Moodle. Right now the courses are small (20-60 students) but one round of post/reply triggers the rejections.

What do others use Moodle forums on a DreamHost site?

-- Sherry
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In reply to Sherry Brown

Re: Dreamhost & Forums on Moodle

by Marc Grober -
I pursued this with DH and while told that they would be happy to try and meet in the middle, their idea of meeting in the middle seemed to be a recitation of their policy. Repeated attempts to have them address the specifics of Moodle functionality resulted in no substantive response, save the suggestion that it should be inexpensive enough to rewrite moodle software to meed their requirements....

That said, I suppose one could attempt to address the obvious impact of the bulk mail limit, which is a separate matter from the SPAM/Abuse policy, by setting fixing all forums to digest and throttling the mail, but the limit of 200 outgoing per hour with a possible increase to 500 would not address what I understand to be your underyling focus, a teacher support moodle with thousands of members.

There could be some ways around that by identifying a remote host used only for outgoing mail and mounting that server's resources so mail from moodle is spooled to it instead of to DH.... but I suppose if you were to be able to identify a webhoster that provided all the features that DH does and is more expansive mail wise that would besomething to look at. With all the discussion here about what web hosts to use, it might be nice if we had a wiki matrix that compared various options across the spectrum of web hosts (though tables in wiki can be gnarly and easily corrupted)
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In reply to Marc Grober

Re: Dreamhost & Forums on Moodle

by Fred Bloggs -
Currently using 1.9+

I tend to use shared hosting and this "subscription to forums" is a real menace.

I've been using Moodle for years like this and yes, if you do a search you'll see I've had the same complaint for as long. In 1.7 and 1.5 I could dutifully go through a list of who is subscribed to a forum and then remove their subscription.

Despite having set a forum as "Subscriptions not allowed" in 1.9+ I have discovered that in fact people are are subscribed automatically anyway thoughtful. To make matters worse I now have to login as an individual user to unsubscribe them.

The problem is that a good webhost (shared) permits 500 emails an hour and closes you down if you exceed this. One hundred subscribed students and six posts/replies in 30 minutes - pushes you over that limit. This is very important. A reasonable webhost will permit the management of 200 students with ease for $5 a month - it's a very powerful way to operate and deploy Moodles - everything works great EXCEPT for this email hazard..

Perhaps I'm doing something wrong. I've tried overriding permissions in the students role (that's not worked) but if anyone knows how to stop these emails firing off into everyones spam box then please tell me.

In fact my local solution ( I deal with 400 students) to this is to start off students on a Moodle forum and then close it after five weeks and transfer them to a different type of forum with their same user names and passwords and where I can stop this subscription thing happening. The students are happy with this solution and the other forum is a little more "forum-ish" amd attractive than the Moodle offering which I believe is structured in the way it is for pedagogical reasons.

For future releases of Moodle could we please have a separate type of forum where under NO circumstances emails are launched off at innocent victims.
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In reply to Fred Bloggs

Re: Dreamhost & Forums on Moodle

by Marc Grober -
This is a real pain all the way around...... and with respect to DH, the bulk mail may not be as much as problem as the SPAM/ABUSE policy as one could make the argument that Moodle does not comply.....

I do have to note that I think forums are arguably used inappropriately for social chatter and that setting everyone to digest could resolve the e-mail problem as well as move some of the chatter to irc, chat, jabber, messaging or what have you.... I do include an introductory lesson for all moddlers on getting pop-ups allowed and messaging working for just that purpose, as well as provide jabber accounts (though I am still puzzling about automating the latter with DH).

However, as to your particular complaints:

As I understand it you created a forum and in the forum configuration page you set the fotum as regular format and as subscriptions not allowed. However you find students subscribed.

Is this all students in the class, some students in the class? Could it be a function of responding to a forum with autosubscribe on (where the student's profile is trumping the forum setting) or is this automagically happening for all students immediately upon the creation of the new forum (and how did you determine this if that is the case?)


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In reply to Fred Bloggs

Re: Dreamhost & Forums on Moodle

by John Isner -
Despite having set a forum as "Subscriptions not allowed" in 1.9+ I have discovered that in fact people are are subscribed automatically anyway. To make matters worse I now have to login as an individual user to unsubscribe them.

See discussion http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=94386

The default setting in the User profile is to "Automatically subscribe me to forums that I post to."

Even if the forum itself has a setting "No subscriptions allowed" the profile setting trumps the forum and students become subscribed. This is annoying.

In the above discussion, you can find instructions for changing the default (using phpmyadmin) and then changing current subscriptions (also using phpmyadmin).
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In reply to John Isner

user profile "automatically subscribe" setting overrides forum setting

by Marc Grober -
Thanks John....

I figured that was the issue but had not seen the bug discussion.... and I did not see that that anyone filed a tracker on it....

If you know what the MDL# is on the report could you post that?

Marc
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In reply to Marc Grober

Re: user profile "automatically subscribe" setting overrides forum setting

by John Isner -
Hi Marc,

I found two related issues

  • MDL-8529 "Provide a way to set defaults for the standard User Account fields." It mentions forum auto-subscribe as one of the standard profile options that should allow user-defined defaults
  • MDL-13216 "User Profile Global Options" which looks like a duplicate.
These are marked "New feature" and "Improvement" respectively. Neither one mentions the email-related problems this is causing users. Sherry and Bob should add their comments to one or both issues, and vote to have them fixed (I just voted).
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