The idea of adding to the calendar an event(s) when restricting forum ratings was mentioned at http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=116662. Initially I was going to just create an issue in the tracker but figured I would see what it would take to bang out a quick patch. The quiz module provided a good example which I followed and it is a pretty simple patch. This issue is related to MDL-18299 which requests open and close dates be created in the calendar based on the conditional activities fields, MDL-15235 which requests the ability to set open/close availability dates (completed already in Moodle 2.0), and MDL-7185 which requested some type of notification to the student when the ratings were being limited. All of these seem to be somewhat loosely related. Since most of them are resolved in Moodle 2.0 I would propose that the patch (which was designed against 1.9) could be applied to HEAD for 2.0.

The attached patch file implements adding to the calendar an event if the ratings are restricted, updating the events (using the same approach in quiz of first deleting all the events and creating new ones), and deleting events when the forum is deleted. I'm not sure (and have not tested) what validity checks may or may not be done to ensure that the end date is not prior to the start date. I do like the idea of indicating not only the activity in the event name but also some type of description of what is happening (perhaps based on event type). So I created a couple of language strings to describe the event. I would also like to go back and review MDL-7185 a little more closely to make sure that all of those issues are addressed. In particular, when looking at the forum description I think there should be some indication to the student what the rating restrictions are (if they exist) in addition to the calendar events that this patch addresses.

Peace - Anthony