Ray Morris

> However, it is not a matter of logic. ...

> the changes they made give you better results when you look at who ends up in the PHM group. Can't argue with that.

I understand what you're saying.  Just for fun, I'd like to try arguing with that:

class forum_post {
    function get_author_name() {
        return 'Ray Morris';
    }
    function get_author_country() {
        if(substr($this->get_author_name(), 1) == 'R') {
            return 'US';
        }
    }
}

I tested that with against an earlier post in this thread and it gives reasonably accurate results at the moment. That must be the right way to do it.  Can't argue with that. 

The functions above are silly examples, of course, but I think they illustrate a valid point. The scoring algorithm might work okay (or not), but the argument that it happens to give reasonable-looking results at the moment isn't al that persuasive, to me.

As Séverin and Nicolas have said, I'm having trouble imagining why you'd not count a post that's been marked "useful" if it happens to be the first post in the a thread.  I must be missing something.  It seems that pushes the forums more toward being strictly a question-and-answer support resource, rather than a discussion community.  You don't want to recognize people posting useful things like Moodle news, interesting new ways of doing things in Moodle, warnings about gotchas, etc?

john Simpson said this thread is a good example:

https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=278302

Rick, I am attaching a zip file of our used/unused question plugin which should make deleting unused questions very quick and easy.  On the standard question bank page, you'll see a new dropdown where you can choose "only unused questions".  You can then tick the checkbox just above the question list to "select all", then delete using the button at the bottom of the page.

These plugins work with Moodle 2.7 and 2.8. Please understand this plugin has only been used by one organization so far. It works for us.  It has not been extensively peer reviewed and tested.  Therefore, you may want to spot-check the results before doing the bulk delete.  You may want to run a backup of your question bank first. 

There is now a plugin available to find questions in the question bank by searching the text.  For example, you could find all of the questions (and answers) that contain the word "chocolate".  This works in the Question Bank interface and in the quiz editing interface where you select questions to add.

It can be found in the Plugins directory as local/ Search Questions.

Also visible in the screenshot i an upcoming plugin to find questions that haven't been used in a quiz yet, which can be useful for finding questions to add to a quiz - no need to look at ones you've already added. That plugin will be headed to the directory later when I get time to clean up the coding style (whitepace, etc.), write a README file, etc.  Also coming soon is a plugin to find questions by Tags. That's also working, but needs style cleanup, a readme, etc. Volunteers accepted for that polishing work.

You used the example 98,765.  Is that number larger or smaller than 100?  To most people in the world, 98,765 comes between 98 and 99.  Only if you were raised in the US or UK is that a large number.

To students raised in the US and UK, 98,765 is "ninety eight thousand  seven hundred sixty five".  Students raised most other places will see that as "ninety eight and 765 thousands", what people in the US would write as 98.765. 

This has been discussed A LOT among Moodle users and developers over the course of many years.  The short form of the story is that there's no way to use a thousands separator that won't confuse many of the students. The decimal separator is required, even though it has mostly the same problem, but the thousands separator isn't, so it's probably a good idea to leave it out.