|
Assigning to me temporarily because Vy-Shane no longer works for Moodle HQ.
This would be a massively useful feature in Japan and I am very keen to see this.
I am slightly depressed to see this marked as "trivial". This is a very, very important feature in Japan, where forums basically don't work if they are not anonymous. I think this would be useful in many contexts all over the world. In my University we use the forums for trying to get feedback from students for our Staff-Student committee. Without an anonymous forum, students are reluctant to express opinions which may be deemed "controversial". Also, we have a high number of Asian (particularly Chinese) students whom are less comfortable speaking out.
I vote whole heartedly for this feature to be added to moodle. Thanks, Stuart Anderson, Our faculty are also interested in seeing such a feature added to forums.
Ken Newquist We also have a client who will be interested in having this option.
We have school counselors who are interested in this option. What is the status?
Jill Brown, Director of Educational Technology Attached is a patch against 1.9 that implements anonymous forums as described in the first comment. The patch is incomplete in that it lacks database migration hooks, but these should be simple for a more experienced Moodle developer to add
 The new columns to support this feature are:
forum: forum_posts: When creating a forum, you can now specify if posts should be anonymous, not anonymous, or optionally anonymous. In the latter case, users are presented with a checkbox that they can tick if they want their post to be anonymous. Anonymous posts get hidden from the post history on the user's profile, as well as the recent activity block and recent activity full report. When displayed and emailed, the anonymous posts are attributed to the name specified in $CFG->anonymous_name (e.g. 'Anonymous Student'), with current_theme()/pix/anonymous.png used as their picture. If anyone discovers or knows of other areas where anonymous forum posts would be displayed improperly please let me know. Well done Jason. I think this would be a highly valuable addition to the forum behaviour and strongly feel it should be patched into the moodle 2.0 development code early on. It will provide a means for our shy international students to contribute their opinions without being identified.
Thanks again for all your work. Revised my first patch to fix the following issues:
does this patch allow guest users to post ?
No this patch allows authenticated users to make posts which are flagged as "anonymous" if the forum settings allow it. These posts are all displayed as belonging to a fake anonymous user, but they still belong to real users. The patch implements all the behaviors described in Martin's post.
The problem will be, that we have to change the core code and updates will be more difficulty, therefore a solution would be fine, where this feature is part of the core
Peter I too would like to see this patch applied to core.
I'm attaching a patch (anonymous_forums_rev2p1.patch) that:
The patch applies on top of Jason's anonymous_forums_rev2.patch.
patch applies on top of anonymous_forums_rev2.patch New patch (anonymous_forums_rev2p2.patch) that also masks user names for anonymous posts in the global search. Again, it applies on top of anonymous_forums_rev2.patch (but includes my previous patch).
Shane Elliott was working on something like this, but we'd planned it to work for everywhere in Moodle. Shane, this could be useful to look at.
Anonymity support that would apply everywhere in Moodle would be good. Some things are very hard to do just in a single module.
Here is my patch #3 (anonymous_forums_rev2p3.patch, which applies on top of anonymous_forums_rev2.patch), which fixes the following issues:
Remaining issues that I'm aware of:
Moral of the story: anonymity is very hard to do. Hi, finally catching up on some of my dev plans/work. Martin and I had discussed an anonymous mode in moodle that would work for all the activities. The basic idea being that "teachers" could switch an activity (forum, chat, etc) into anonymous mode. There would also be capabilities that would determine who could view the real name of users. Users could either add an anonymous name in their profile or moodle would revert to a language string eg "Anonymous"
Many thanks for the patches and comments. At a quick glance I think there is some important work and ideas done here. I'll start some documention at the docs site as soon as I can and then post the link back here and hopefully we can get the ball rolling on this. Important to my students, who don't want to appear foolish by asking the wrong questions. As a quick suggestion, would a line of least resistance be to make 'anonymous' an actual user id and replace the users id with the new anonymous ID? Just a thought.
It all depends on what level of anonymity you want. If you want it to be impossible to recover the true identity, then yes, you would replace the user's ID with the anonymous user's ID in the database. However, it seems like the way Moodle wants to do things is to keep the user's ID in the database, so that the identity can be recovered, which means that a lot of obfuscation needs to be done.
I don't think this should be trivial, so I'm bumping up the priority level (if I may) to reflect the # of votes and so on. thanks!
teachers asked my about anonimity in the Questionnaire activity module
(it is in the contrib section and it does not come default with fresh moodle install) http://cvs.moodle.org/contrib/plugins/mod/questionnaire/ 
it is a great module for getting student's feedback and most of them would like to so please consider that module in your future patches (if you can) minor patch to fix the RSS anonymous checking, need to check the forum property not the record one in the second conditional check
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
New Feature
Open
Major
Add a forum option to allow anonymous posting
 |
|
All content on this web site is made available under the GNU General Public License, unless otherwise stated.
A more generic solution would be to add a parameter specifying the type for each forum:
a. normal forum
b. anonymous forum
c. normal forum with anonymous posts allowed
In case c, users should be presented an extra button to post either under their name or anonymously. In case b, the submit button should probably be renamed to sth like post anonymously to forum.
Moodle would store posts as it does now but in case b (for all posts) and c (for posts requested to be anonymous) set a flag in the database (an extra field) that marks a given post as anonymous.
The code that displays posts would check this flag and use a different branch to display them, giving user name as anonymous and using the generic user image.
The mail sending code would also have to have a branch to specify sender as anonymous <noreply@xxx.yyy>.
This would eliminate extensive changes in other library functions as suggested in Timothy's hack (cf http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=22530
).
This would also eliminate a need for signing up under dummy names, thus allowing otherwise normal use of other course activities, and in extreme cases it would allow admins to track down users making inappropriate posts.