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.
My Moodle bar is almost ready for public release. I have cleaned the code up (a lot), the bar now installs with just one simple PHP include tag in the footer of your Moodle theme. The buttons now have a CSS based tooltip rollover (like Facebook). I just have a few Internet Explorer 7 glitches to take care of.
I am also planning a notifications module for the bar which will alert users of messages, deadlines and calendar events.
I have just finished an early release of my Moodle Twitter Block. The block simply allows you to post a tweet to a Twitter account. At present it asks you to enter your Twitter username and password but I will be customising this to pull the data from user profile fields already in Moodle. A lot of work has already been done on a similar block by M3 (http://m3.jiscemerge.org.uk/) but I wanted to create my
As promised, I have released the Moodle Bar. The release date coinsides with the iMoot 2010.
It is available direct from this website by following this link:
Please feel free to use it, hack it, modify it and do with it what you will.
Do send me an email though so I can see it in action on your Moodle sites.
Today I created the first ever Moodle themed persona for Firefox 3.6!
To view it please visit: http://bit.ly/d7ZJgc
I hope to create many more!
Creating an index on the mdl_log table against info speeds up a standard Moodle installation. Some users have reported huge performance increases, so much so that people have suggested that this be in the standard Moodle build by default.
So far I have noticed some improvements but nothing quite as fantastic as other users are reporting, having said that, maybe you may notice a speed increase to your site, try it leave me a comment here.