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  1. Moodle
  2. MDL-50993

Timed discussions are not displayed to students in a logical order

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    • MOODLE_30_STABLE
    • MOODLE_30_STABLE
    • MDL-50993-master
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      Setup:

      • Turn on timed forum posts
      • Create a course
      • Create a forum in the course
      • Have a teacher and student enrolled in the course

      Test:

      • As the teacher, create a forum post (P1), setting the timestart to, say, tomorrow.
      • As the teacher, create another post (P2) with no timestart.
      • View the list of discussions. Without this patch, the second post P2 is shown on top, with the patch, P1 is shown on top. This is as that is the more reasonable display of posts when taking into account the time the post will be released.
      • If you wait a day, or adjust the timemodified and timestart values of the posts directly in the DB, and view the list as the student
      • You should see P1 on top with this patch.

      Without it, P2 would be on top, making it unclear to the student that P1 is actually a "newer" post they haven't seen before.

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      Setup: Turn on timed forum posts Create a course Create a forum in the course Have a teacher and student enrolled in the course Test: As the teacher, create a forum post (P1), setting the timestart to, say, tomorrow. As the teacher, create another post (P2) with no timestart. View the list of discussions. Without this patch, the second post P2 is shown on top, with the patch, P1 is shown on top. This is as that is the more reasonable display of posts when taking into account the time the post will be released. If you wait a day, or adjust the timemodified and timestart values of the posts directly in the DB, and view the list as the student You should see P1 on top with this patch. Without it, P2 would be on top, making it unclear to the student that P1 is actually a "newer" post they haven't seen before.

      With forum_enabletimedposts enabled, when viewing a table of discussion topics within a forum (or the Latest News block), the user is presented a list of discussions in the order they were created (due to ORDER BY timemodified DESC: https://github.com/moodle/moodle/blob/master/mod/forum/lib.php#L2670). This can become confusing for students (or cause students to miss discussions altogether) in an active forum as it means when a timed posts becomes available, it will appear below any more recently created posts.

      This becomes more apparent when utilising the Latest News block as a discussion with a timestart date could never be shown in the block due to the posts being ordered by timemodified.

      It would seem to make sense to override the timemodified field with the timestart field (if set) in all areas to ensure discussions are displayed in the order they are made available to students.

            aolley Adam Olley
            gregor89 Greg Faller
            Ryan Wyllie Ryan Wyllie
            Andrew Lyons Andrew Lyons
            Adrian Greeve Adrian Greeve
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            11 Start watching this issue

              Created:
              Updated:
              Resolved:

                Error rendering 'clockify-timesheets-time-tracking-reports:timer-sidebar'. Please contact your Jira administrators.