David Scotson

Many of these request come up quite a lot. I suspect eventually they will all get implemented, just because they get asked for again and again.

I would however like to point out that many of the features you are talking about are common only to Bulletin Board or Forum software, that is I mean software that only does forums has has no other features. This means they need to put all their community building tools into forum posts. For example:

• Bulletin Board feature -> Moodle features
• sticky posts -> resources, wikis and the intro text for a forum
• poll posts -> choices, surveys, questionnaire, feedback module, quiz

Then there is the fact that most of these forum tools are unthreaded. This design choice means that many things are done differently because multiple conversations are intertwined, not linked in the database but only because people quote a post further up the discussion:

• auto-quoting -> reply to a specific post
• split multiple posts -> split a thread at its root and all child posts follow

Some other things in your list are good ideas, they're just clearly influenced by a different way of doing things e.g. if you want a busy forum with lots of moderators that aren't necessarily trusted teachers then why not make a social format course, which is seperate from all the actual teaching courses? 'Teachers' in that course have no extra rights in other parts of the Moodle unless explicitly given them. (I think Moodle 1.7 is implementing a feature like this anyway, but more generally so you can have different 'teachers' responsible for different course sections and activity etc.)

As I said I think these ideas will eventually be implemented anyway. It's very difficult to defend intentionally not implementing a feature. I think that's part of why most software gets bloated and more difficult to use over time (e.g. Microsoft Office) unless you have someone with an iron will ensuring that it doesn't happen and things remain coherent and focused (e.g. see Apple software/hardware or the Mozilla-Firefox transition).

Sorting by language or country is cool, though the order of terms seems to matter e.g. if you do Moodle, WebCT & Sakai but put Sakai first you get these regions (spot the connection?):

1. Viet Nam
2. Indonesia
3. Malaysia
4. Singapore
5. Korea
6. Hong Kong
7. Thailand
8. Philippines
9. Japan
10. Taiwan

Moodle on the other hand seems to be going strong in Spanish speaking areas.

Those are just results from Google News and Google. Moodle occasionally makes it into Google News stories but it seems like it's never got its name into the headline.

But these things can be misleading, note for example that the story about Hyperformix is about them appointing someone called Mr. Sakai as their chief financial officer.

Moodle has a very unique name so it is actually undereported compared with Sakai and (even more so) Blackboard. The Moodle vs. WebCT graph was of most interesting to me because it removes these confounding factors to a great degree.

(Amusing aside, I tried the three programming languages, Ruby, Perl and Python and noticed a really big spike for Python. Following the little lettered flag to the related news story it turned out to be because people were searching for pictures and video of a actual python that had tried eat an alligator and exploded. So beware about making extrapolatins from these results)

The easiest way is probably to duplicate your theme, give it a new name, then upload and select that theme.

This achieves the same effect as Andrew's suggestion (basically creating a new URL for the CSS) but with slightly less effort, or at least a different kind of effort.

FYI, the Moodle CSS does have an expiry date (something surprisingly short like 30 minutes) but browsers and proxies can be a bit odd about actually following these directions.

I noticed this problem as well, and filed bug 4811. The issue hasn't been closed but Delius may have got around to it and just forgot to close the bug.