Forums | E-Learning Practitioners

27 September 2014, 12:20

Is anyone using the "anonymous posting" option for forums? It doesn't seem to be working. Once it logs off the user then the following message appears: "You do not have permission to add a new discussion topic for all participants." and students can't post. Any idea on how to solve this?

30 September 2014, 10:41

Hi Nathalie,

I'm not aware of any issues with the anonymous forum positing feature.  If you haven't already, could you raise a Helpdesk ticket giving details of what's happening and the support team will look into it further for you.

Gill

30 September 2014, 14:20

I have anonymous posting enabled on my student forum and I have just tried using it. It seems very fragile, whereas before the upgrade it worked well. It took me several attempts to post anonymously and every time QMplus failed it did so differently. On one occasion I ended up with a page of JavaScript! I don't think I saw exactly the same error message that Nathalie describes but I saw others. When I finally succeeded in submitting an anonymous post I could not log back in using the link in the Settings menu and I had to log back in from the home page. Anonymous posting seems to be very unreliable but it would be difficult to describe exactly what goes wrong in a help ticket. It will be interesting to see how my students get on with it!

Francis

02 October 2014, 17:48

Hello,

Just a follow up to say that the Helpdesk have determined that Nathalie's issue is related to her particular forum having the "Group mode" set to "Separate groups".   It needs to be set to "No groups". This isn't a bug with the anonymous posting feature, it's just that anonymous posting is incompatible with the group feature.  

Gill

02 October 2014, 21:27

Just to clarify I think the problem came from the fact that I had created a group for staff only and haven't yet found a way to put all my students in a different group call students (I remember a lot of discussions around that topic last year, just didn't find the time to look into it yet and the idea of havign to add the 100 students manually is slightly putting me off!). Therefore staff could post on the forum but student couldn't. I think if your groups are set up properly (and everyone is part of a grop) then there should be no problem.

06 October 2014, 14:20

Hi again,

I think there may be a conflation of two issues here:

1. If you have a group enabled forum and you haven't put all your students into groups, those not in a group will not be able to use the forum.  This doesn't have anything to do with anonymous posting.  Those not in a group will see an error message when they click on a group enabled forum.
2. The anonymous posting feature doesn't work with groups, even if your groups are completely set up.  My understanding is that this is because to post anonymously, you are logged in as another user.  That user isn't a member of any group and therefore does not have the appropriate permissions to post to a group enabled forum.

Gill

 

06 October 2014, 15:14

Have been an interested observer of this discussion... and thanks, Gill, for explaining the logic of this limited functionality (at least from the system's point-of-view).

 

I appreciate that it's all semantics, but if the system allows users to configure a forum with certain settings in place (anonymity + separate groups), but such a configuration doesn't work in practice, then this sounds like a bug to me rather than an unsupported feature! Might there be any value in getting the issue raised on Moodle Tracker, with a view to having it addressed in future releases?

 

All best

Matthew

06 October 2014, 18:12

Hi Matthew,

You're right.  The way the anonymous forum posting feature works is not ideal from a user perspective and it would be good if you could not configure things in ways that don't actually work.  Whether this is a bug or not is arguable but I can see why you would call it a bug.

While the discussion forum is a core Moodle feature, the anonymous posting feature is a plug in.  This means asking for changes to this plug in wouldn't go in the Moodle tracker but would have to go through the plug in developer.  

Gill