Forum OpenACS Q&A: How would you go about this?
Ideally this should be done without having to set permissions explicitly on every message posted by the admin.
Yes this sounds a bit like email! But the client is security concious and doesn't want messages leaving the environment of the site.
Which module could be most easily configured to approximate this functionality without new development?
Regards
Richard
I'll set it up as you suggest. Thanks for the reply.
R.
This is a requirement for us on the Concord Consortium project. We haven't done it yet but we did discuss it a bit.
We'd love to work with you if we are doing something similar.
This is a copy of our disucussion:
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Private Discussion Areas:
This is a blackboard feature we need to replicate. Looks like they are using subgroups. This seems very awkward.
My first thought is to create 1 forum per student and give just that student and group admin permissions on it. Other thoughts?
here is the write up from Blackboard.
Each of you has your own Private Conference Area for discussing personal questions and concerns with your facilitator that you'd rather not share with the larger group. From this point on, please use your Private Conference Area instead of emailing your facilitator with personal or private questions. This helps to keep a record of all interactions with you in one place; by keeping information centralized inside the course, questions and issues are less likely to fall through the cracks. (But feel free to email your facilitator if something urgent occurs.)
Please continue to post all questions about assignments, technical issues, or other topics in the appropriate public threads of the Discussion Board, so the rest of the group can benefit from the answers. And, remember, we all learn together; if you have a question, there are probably at least two colleagues who have the same one, so please don't be shy about asking publicly. However, if you do have a question of a more private nature, go ahead and use your Private Conference Area.
Private Conference Areas and Feedback
Each week, you'll receive feedback on how you're doing, including both strengths and suggestions for improvement. This will be based on the rubrics posted in RTT Highlights. Although your facilitator may respond directly to your posted comments in the Discussion Board, you'll always get private feedback, too, in your Private Conference Area.
• A course announcement alerts you when new feedback has been posted. (In general, you should find feedback on the previous week's work by mid-week of the new week.)
At that point, you should do two things in response:
• Hop over to Communication, then look at Group Pages, and click on your Private Conference Area. Open the Discussion Board and, inside, find the Feedbackforum, and read any new documents.
• Feel free to reply, if you have any questions or comments.
Locate Your Private Conference Area
Read all the instructions below before you begin. You may want to open a second browser window, so you can see these instructions in one window while navigating to your Private Conference Area in the other.
1. Click Communication in the navigation bar.
2. Click the link for Group Pages.
3. Locate your Private Group Space, called (Your name) Private Conference Area.
4. Open the Discussion Board within your Private Conference Area. You'll see two main categories: Feedback and Chitchat. Both forums function just like those within the regular Discussion Board where you've been interacting with the entire class.
5. Feel free to ask a question, if you have one, or just say "hi" in Chitchat. You'll need to start a new thread to do this (just use the "Add New Thread" button).
Posted by Caroline Meeks
2: Re: Private Discussion Area In response to 1 06/02/04 12:32 AM [ Reply | Forward ]
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It seems as it is an internal messaging system. Isn't it?
Posted by Ernie Ghiglione
3: Re: Private Discussion Area In response to 1 06/02/04 02:30 AM [ Reply | Forward ]
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Well, the 4th point actually states how this is done in Blackboard, therefore I'd suggest to make use of forums instead the way Caroline describes it, with the note, that each student has *two* forums (one for feedback, one for chitchat).
Actually, better would be one forum and we enable categories with forum postings (which would be more work, but the better way to do this, so a tutor could get a list of all forum postings by his/her students which are "feedback" or "chitchat" on one page).
Posted by Malte Sussdorff
However I need to get something quick and dirty up really soon so I have already installed forums and will be playing with permissions settings in a few days.
Initially I plan to block access to the forums main page to all but admin users, and provide a link in the member 'workspace' to the forum associated with the member. This means that the admin user can get at all of the forums but each user can only get at their own. This will do for now because my current requirement is only for secure messaging between admin and users but a full solution should cover messages between users also.
My thoughts for the bigger better version:
- I think that the guts of the functionality is already in the forums package and so any new module ideally will be an intelligently modified forums package. Maybe even a mode of operation selectable by setting a parameter in the forums package. (Each message area should be called something other than a forum to make the distinction clear - i.e. change nomenclature).
- A parameter should determine whether or not a private message area is automatically created (accessible from the member 'workspace') when a new user registers.
- The page that each user sees when navigating to the root of the mounted module should be user specific and show/list message areas that they own. Navigation of message areas beyond that point should support the use of acs categories.
- There should be a parameter setting to grant the option for each user to be able to set up private message areas at will and specify which other parties can read/write etc.
- The setting of permissions will be compliant with the norms associated with acs groups and parties.
- Registered users should be able to send messages to other users private message areas (if they permit that) by referring to the 'contacts' package (currently under development by Mathew Geddert) and selecting 'send a private message to ...' (this should probably be a service contract implementation so that it can be included in other apps such as the logger, project manager and the registered user directory). The service contract implementation would perform the task of finding the user_id of the user that you want to send a message to and managing the message entry forms. This service contract should also handle the process of authorising the recipient to reply to you in your own specified private message areas. These inter-user features should be able to be switched off by parameter setting.
Effectively then each application (such as contacts or contacts-lite) would have to provide a service contract implementation for the secure messaging system. We would need to define the service contract as part of the scoping out process of the secure messaging system.
What do you think?
