Thanks for reporting this and providing a solution.

I'm not sure why $special needs to be set to true twice. I assume it's used later after the if construct.

Thanks for the patch Emanuel.

I have now created the branches. I slightly altered the regex and added a few checks to prevent unwanted errors/notices. I also agree that this could should not be duplicated but as I created a new function to handle it, I realised that they were slightly different in some places. Merging them would be part of a small refactoring which should be part of a new issue.

Thanks Fred and Emanuel,

Patch looks good, pushing for integration review.

Hi Fred,

I've added a link to MDL-26094.

Seems this functionality is missing documentation, so whilst you are here, please could add a brief note about the special commands on: http://docs.moodle.org/23/en/Chat_sessions (so at least non-developers can find out it exists).

A few words on the patch provided. The 'To' issue came from a weak comparison `if (substr($text, 0, 2) == 'To')`. As soon as the sentence started with 'To' is was considered as a special message to a user, leading to errors. I have transformed that into a regex so that now 'To' has to be followed by a space and the user the message is sent to, ending with colon. I have also added some fallbacks so that the chat does not crash if something goes wrong.

Thanks Fred/Emanuel, i've integrated this now.

Note, as requested I think we need a brief mention of the special commands in the docs, so i've added this as a testing step to ensure its there.

Adding Helen as watcher to have her opinion.

About the docs, I noticed that `/me` and `beep` are already mentioned. Regarding the `To <nickname>: <message>`, IMO that should not be mentioned. It's better having users clicking on the 'Send message' link which adds the correct command to the input field. The `To` command is weak and accepts anything as <nickname>.

The docs also mentioned `:` as an alias of `/me`, I removed that as it's not a feature, and I don't think it was ever working.

Hi Fred,

Thanks for improving the docs by removing the reference to ':'.

Regarding 'To <nickname>: <message>', I didn't know of the possibility to send a chat message to only one participant. I don't see a 'Send message' link anywhere in the chat window either, so I'm a bit confused about what you mean!

Me too!

Helen, Mary, sorry I meant 'Talk' right next to 'Beep'. And you're right it does not send a private message to only one participant but highlights a message like this one on the chat: "Officer said to Timmy Valmer: Hi Timmy".

The chat activity seems to be working as described. Passing.

Fred, thanks for your comment, however I'm still confused as I can't see a 'Talk' link either! I'm looking at http://qa.moodle.net/mod/chat/view.php?id=10 and have entered the chat logged in as a teacher in one browser and as a student in another browser.

Strange, it's apparently not available on QA. But it is on my Moodle master (and previous) and I can't find any way of disabling or enabling this.

See screen shot attached.

Fred, thanks for your screenshot. Now I believe you! (Only joking.)

It is very strange, as I also tried http://demo.moodle.net (using Moodle 2.2) and didn't see a talk link, but found it on http://school.demo.moodle.net. I wondered whether it could possibly be a themes thing, as when there is a talk link, there is also a themes link (for changing the chat window between bubbles and compact, as mentioned in http://docs.moodle.org/en/Using_Chat ) however when I switched school.demo to use the binarius theme, the same as the QA site, the talk and themes links remained. Thus, it's a mystery!

YEAR!*

CAF*, TOT!*

• Your effort amazingly resulted. (unbelievable :-P)
• Closing as fixed.
• Tons of thanks.