Moodle plugins directory: Auto Group

Would it be possible to add "country" to the possible criteria for auto-grouping? I'm running a MOOC and need to arrange the groups that way. In the past week, I've had to group over 400 users manually!

it would be doable but we don't really have anyone with time to work on this right now. If you have someone to develop and put in a pull request I am working on those right now. In the meantime, could you just sync the country field to a custom field and work it that way?

Thank you! I'll try that work around. If you do eventually get around to adding more fields, why not simply add all potentially useful fields, not just "country".

Dear Emma,
first of all congratulations, your plugin looks impressive!
I have a request similar to the one of Ian Fourie dated 14 nov 2019.
Some of our users need to be part of multiple groups: would it be possible to adopt a delimiter which would allow us to insert the values of multiple groups into 1 custom profile field so that certain users may be added to multiple groups?

Please post on our github. If there is any chance of you coming up with a fix that we can review, go ahead and do a pull request.

I love your plugin.

Here is a feature request, that a lot of perople would help:

the plugin adds new user to an existing group - that's what it does right now.
It would be great, if the manager or trainer could tell the plugin for how many days / months that should be done. After the predefined period of time, the plugin creats a new group itself and adds the new user to this group. After the predefined period, a new group will be created and so on.

That would help a lot of people who have courses which start more than once a year and forget to add a new group and reconfigure the plugin again and again.

Sorry for my bad English, but I hope you understand what I want to say.

Thank you so much

Greetings from Munich, Germany

Uli

That really does not make much sense. This plugin creates groups based on user profile fields. If you change a profile field, the group will be created and updated at that point. It does not add users to existing groups unless the group was originally created by the plugin. So there is no need to reconfigure the plugin ever - just change what is in the profile field that the plugin is configured to watch...

Just done a quick test on a fresh 3.10. It seems works correctly .
I let Emma (current lead maintainer) to do more extensive tests and update plugin details to add 3.10 as supported versions.

Hey, great work! This plugin really saved my bacon, removing the need to manually create groups for each department in each course and keeping users synchronized (some people change departments like other change their underwear...). Now saying "make groups for all the departments" in the courses that need it suffices. Couldn't be happier!

Moodle 3.8+

Not sure if I've got a bug or if it is poorly configured, but we''ve been seeing groups created manually in a course lose members - they are added manually, and the next day they are no longer in the group they were added to.

I thought Auto Group didn't touch manual groups, only the groups it created?

The plugin was disabled last night, but the 'leakage' of members out of the manually created groups still happened. I'm hoping this is just a simple misconfiguration, but right now I've removed the plugin as it is the only thing I added before this was taking place.

Curious as to why it might have happened even when disabled - and of course it could be something completely unrelated to Auto Group... but it has never happened in any other Moodle we have running - only in the one with Auto Group.

Any ideas?

Are the groups that you are losing members from named the same as some of the autogroups created? If you are still losing people after the plugin was disabled, then I would presume that it has nothing to do with the plugin - can you check the logs?

Thanks Emma - I checked and no, the groups losing members are not created by Autogroup. The users were added manually, but autogroup was running in the site and had a few settings looking at user profile fields. The specific course where it was active contained one group that it created, based on user email addresses. The other groups were all manually made.

The logs show nothing, unfortunately. Does autogroup log its activity or changes it makes?

When I disabled the plugin the effect still happened. When I removed the plugin yesterday and checked today, the groups are still intact. I understand the disabled plugin should not have affected anything, but I am wondering if there is a Cron process using those settings which is not disabled?

To summarise, autogroup config that I was using appears to have removed users from groups that autogroup didn't create, and those users were manually added to the groups. Disabling autogroup in the site admin didn't change the effect, but removing the plugin seems to have stabilised the groups today. I am reasonably sure it may have been a config issue, but there is a possibility of a Cron job actively updating group members. Either way, the only way I could see to prevent it was to remove the plugin.

Apologies for posting this on the plugin page - is there a discussion area where this should go?

Maybe create an issue in github and we can discuss there - I have my site on 3.8.3 - going to check on that...

Have been using the plugin for a while on Moodle 3.9 and it works well organizing our students into groups.

However, all of our teachers teach more than one group and I can´t see a way to have them belong to multiple groups based on the content of a single profile field. Even if I manually add the teachers to several groups after reload they are later removed from those groups by the plugin. Is there any way around this?

I do not use the plugins to assign my teachers. I just do that manually. Just uncheck the teacher role from the plugin.