Moodle plugins directory: Social Comments | Moodle.org
Social Comments
Blocks ::: block_socialcomments
Maintained by 
Björn Lefers, 
Stefan Scholz
Increase student engagement by fostering peer learning through comment subscription, email digests, comments newsfeed, comment search and pinning of important comments and content to the pin board.
Latest release:
298 sites
232 downloads
36 fans
Current versions available: 3
The Social Comments block makes learning more engaging by adding the following features (among others):
- subscribe to an activity/ resource and get an email digest informing you about new comments
- create a collection of the most important comments and activities/ resources of a course by pinning them to the pin board (e. g. to go through them again before an exam)
- check the comments report to see the newest comments or search through all comments
This plugin is part of a collection of open source plugins, which all have the goal to improve the overall usability/ user experience of Moodle. Please find an overview of all used plugins in this video screencast (the Social Comments plugin is shown at 7:55min):
This plugin was developed by Synergy Learning and the initial version was financed by the Berlin School of Economics and Law. Maintenance is handed over from EDU-Werkstatt GmbH to bdecent GmbH by May 2022.
Useful links
Screenshots
Contributors
Björn Lefers (Lead maintainer)
Stefan Scholz
Please login to view contributors details and/or to contact them
Looks great! If a user pastes a link for picture or video, does it automatically show it or is it text-only? Thanks,
it's text-only!
Best
Björn
This is what I've been looking for. This is really helpful for my courses. Thank you.
However, there are two questions that I want to ask about this plugin.
1) Is there any way to automatically add social comments block to all modules that are available in my courses?
2) If I'm not mistaken, based on the screen capture videos above, user will get email notification if somebody reply their comment. But, when I tested it, there is no email sent to my email. Where can I find the guideline to tackle that problem?
Thanks
Thank you for your kind words!
1) You can make a block sticky as described here: https://docs.moodle.org/39/en/Block_settings#Making_a_block_sticky_throughout_a_course
2) It's hard for me to tell what the reason is for you not getting an email notification. It could be your configuration as an instruction, the admin configuration or a technical problem. You'll find more on the topic here: https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=376606
Hope that helps! Should you have any further questions: I'll be on a (much needed) vacation until August 10th, but will respond when I'm back.
Have a great summer!
Best
Björn
This seems like a really useful plugin.
Are you planning on releasing a 3.9 compatible version soon?
Thanks,
Anu
The plugin might already work with version 3.9, but I haven't testet it. Maybe you have the capacities to do so?
But I also passed your comment along to EDU-Werkstatt ( https://edu-werkstatt.berlin/ ), who were kind of enough to take over the maintenance of the plugin
Best
Björn
Sorry for the trouble is fixed now with the new build for release v3.8.
Best Regards
Matthias
BUT it made the security report list a warning with ALL users now defined as "XSS trusted users", which is not so good. When I looked into the security settings, I saw that the capabilities socialcomments:pinitems, socialcomments:postcomments and socialcomments:subscribe are all listed as risky for cross-site scripting attacks. So I had to revert to the old commenting functionality. Any advice on how to handle this?
I’ll do my best to make this great plugin even better!
The social comments block can be used alongside the native comments block. It does not affect the comments system (for example used in the database). I assume that in most scenarios, you’d want to only use one or the other, so probably best to disable core‘s comments block (unless you have a specific usecase for it).
Best
Stefan
2. The subscription of the comment is mail subscription, or in site notification?