Forum .LRN Q&A: Anonymous posting in forums package

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Posted by Nima Mazloumi on
Hi all,

currently forums allow anonymous posts only if "The Public" has the according permissions set for the forum.

While this feature allows true anonymous posting it is not usable since user 0 doesn't exist and for a professor it is not possible to find out which one of the anonymous user he is replying to.

So best option would be to allow posts either with full name or nick but this would introduce alot of code changes and since there is already the concord forum, I don't know if it's worth the effort. I guess we should wait until forums is replaced by concord forums.

So here is what we did. We introduced the parameter UseScreenNameP for the forum package. If the forums admin sets that to true, all posts are displayed with users nicks instead of their full name and no link is offered to their community page. The notification sender changes accordingly. The email of the OutgoingSender (kernel parameter) is used to notify interested parties. It may make sense to have a global notification sender email that could be used instead.

Limitations and further requirements:

- stupid admins could play with that parameter to annoy users. They will ultimately loose trust in using the forum

- We didn't touch the notification package for this improvement. But since notification::new requires an existing user_id for the notif_user switch it makes sense that a unique user exists for the kernel parameter OutgoingSender. Otherwise notification will use the user_id of the real sender which doesn't make sense.

- Also the make that work you need to set the kernel parameter ScreenName to "required" or users won't have unique ScreenNames.

- the parameter is set for the whole package. So any forum defined inside a given package instance will be affected by the parameter setting

The only real limitation is the last one. But so far we had no admin complaining. If anyone is interested in that I can make it available.

Greetings,
Nima