Moodle

I think I may have just fixed this. At least I just fixed MDL-14876, which is related.

Well, looking at the code (in mod/forum/lib.php, forum_cron) it seems to be doing all the right group checks.

Note that, if you are a teacher, and so have the accessallgroups capability, you will get the emails for all groups, irrespective on which groups you are in.

Anyway, I don't feel qualified to investigate this further, so handing back.

If you are a teacher in the course, but are not subscribed to the forum, will you still receive the emails? I am struggling with trying to get only group members to receive these emails of postings, but I'm willing to regulate ALL subscribers to the Forum rather than try to use the Groups function, since it seems that just choosing the group will not keep non-group teachers from receiving the emails. I have some angry physicians who don't want to receive emails re: a group discussion they are not involve in. HELP, please!

We just encountered this bug as well, in the case of a news forum set to "visible groups" and users force-subscribed with "yes, forever". A post to a particular group that I marked as "mail now" was mailed out to all participants, not only those in the group. Unfortunately we do not have the time at the moment to investigate this further, but I though it would nevertheless be useful to report it. Students can get quite worried when they receive emails of posts that don't apply to them.

Updated this to major because of the confusion that incorrectly emailed posts can create among the students.

I was able to solve this problem on my own site by implementing a suggestion made by Tim Hunt:

" If you can see the Override permissions tab, you can use that to change the permissions for the Teacher role to take away the accessallgroups permission in this forum."

I did this across my site. Since teachers are always input as being in the group they need to see, this didn't actually limit anyone's access, but it did make it so that multiple instructors in a course weren't constantly receiving each other's group notices! Until I did this, however, it was very frustrating and I often received emails from irate or confused faculty.

Thanks for staying on top of all these "irritating flies in the ointment!"
Joan Cichon

We (same installation as Gustav) are actually seeing the problem occurring for students as well, not only teachers. So it doesn't appear to be related to the role/permissions settings.

Update to the problem reported by Gustav above: The problem in this installation (in fact, in a particular course) was caused by all students having the "accessallgroups" capability, on the course level.

In that light, it doesn't seem to be a bug in the code. I would support closing the issue, or lowering the priority to "minor".