One of the most annoying things about the Moodle messaging system is that when a user receives a message from a user who has blocked them it doesn’t show.
The message windows still pops up and says there is a message waiting but the user in unable to read it.
Many of our students complained about this as the pop-ups become increasingly annoying.
To fix this I changed the code in /message/discussion.php
Moodle Detective is a tool which collates user information from Moodle and displays it on a page that only Administrators can access.
Moodle Detective came about when I was asked to investigate an particular students” Moodle activity. This student had been sending inappropriate messages to other users and posting obscene things in the forums.
It was then we realised that we needed a reporting feature in Moodle that would bring up a users entire message, blog and forum logs…and that”s exactly what Moodle Detective Does!’,
When a user posts to a forum and unless they click otherwise they are then subscribed to that forum. Many of our users don’t read that far down the page and then complain to me when they receive 100+ forum posts via email.
To stop this from happening I changed the default subscription option at the bottom of the forum reply page so that the default option is DO NOT receive copies of this forum by email.
Here’s how to do it:
We need to change 2 lines of code in the file /mod/forum/post_forum.php (around line 47)
Moodle messaging is a fantastic tool but it is often abused by our students here at college. Students have been reported to spend too much time sending messages in class. Often the male students spend time looking for female students to whom they can send a message to.
When a student receives an unwanted message they can report it by clicking a link.
Although it is possible to remove forum posting rights using roles in Moodle I needed a quick way to ban posting rights for a particular user and forum.
We use Moodle as a student intranet as well as a VLE. On the student intranet we have a student forum where students can discuss almost anything. Occasionally, some students abuse this and post inappropriate messages. We required a way to ban re-offenders from posting to the student intranet forum but retain their posting rights for their course forums.
The Moodle bar provides a quick glance as to how many users are using Moodle at any point in time. In order to extend this functionality we created an Online Users page which does exactly what it says on the tin.
It grabs a list of active users that have been using Moodle in the last 5 minutes. It displays their name and a link to their profile.
When an administrator views this page they see a link to Moodle Detective, a loginas button, an edit profile button, a message history button and an option to send the user a message.
It was brought to my attention that when Moodle filters out a word found in the "bad words" list it in fact leaves the word in the alt text. So moving your mouse over the word "Scunthorpe" produces some quite interesting results!!
The resolve this I edited the file filter/censor/filter.php
And around line 36 replace this code
$words[ ] = new filterobject($badword, ‘<span class="censoredtext" title=".$badword.">’, ‘</span>’,
with this:
As an active XBOX gamer I really like the XBOX Gamercard that allows you to view your score and game progress and compare this with other users.
In fact, I liked the idea so much that I built a Moodle version.
UPDATE: Due to popular demand I will be releasing this block to the Moodle community. I will start working on this in September 2010.
I have just finished work on the beta of the Moodle Course Report Block. An automatic course checking and points scoring system to encourage a balanced blend of resources and activities.
This is a simple idea, but very effective nevertheless.
I have made it even easier to find courses in the MyMoodle course list by placing category icons next to each course name.
Courses in the Sport Category have a small football icon, IT courses have a floppy disc, Tutorial courses have a question mark symbol and so on.
The script works by first checking for a .png file with the name of the category ID. If it finds the file it will include the icon, if an icon has not yet been created for the category then it will show the default icon.