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README
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ANONYMIZABLE FORUM PLUGIN
version 1
Margarita Elkina, Ewgenij Starostin, Jonas Kipp
Berlin School of Economics and Law
October 2011
ABSTRACT This plugin is a fork of the standard
Moodle forum activity, enhanced by the option to post
anonymously. Traceability of real user identities by
administrators is ensured, but they are concealed from
ordinary users and (under certain conditions) from
trainer roles.
INTRODUCTION
As the long-lasting bug MDL-1071 demonstrates, there is a continuing
need for a Moodle activity that lets some or all members of a course
express themselves anonymously.
Previous approaches, such as the series of patches attached to MDL-1071,
have focused on patching the standard forum activity not to display the
names of post authors when a flag is set for a given post in the
database.
The potential for developing general means of anonymization in Moodle
has also been recognized and documented in bug MDL-22275 and its
accompanying wiki page, but that approach appears dormant at the moment.
Anonymization is a vague concept, and there exist many possible
interpretations and use cases for it. Ours is as follows.
- Any course participant who may normally post in a forum may, in our
activity, choose to do so anonymously; this works the same way for
creating a new thread and for replying to an existing one. The choice
is not enforced in either way.
- Anonymous posts are displayed in our activity as originating from an
'Anonymous' user, and no link to the real author is provided.
- An anonymous post may not be edited or deleted by its author, unless
he or she is privileged to edit or delete any posts in the forum.
Trainers may edit and delete anonymous posts just like normal posts.
- The author's ID is recorded in the Moodle database and any anonymous
post can be traced to its author by anyone with access to the
database.
- Users are made to acknowledge conditions and warnings for posting
anonymously.
IMPLEMENTATION
Our code is a fork of the standard forum activity, altered so as to work
as an external plug-in. We have changed the posting code so as not to
record the real author's identity in the normal forum tables if the user
wishes to remain anonymous, and instead to record a special anonymous
user's ID. The real author's ID is instead written to the
mdl_forumanon_assignment table.
Except for the accounting changes and the addition of two checkboxes to
the posting form, the code generally works the same way as in the
standard forum.
SETUP
The anonymizable forum activity is installed by unzipping the archive in
the mod/ directory of a Moodle site. Moodle version 2.1 is required.
There should be a mod/forumanon directory after unzipping, and it is
necessary for an administrator to open the notifications page in the
site settings and to proceed with the prompted upgrade.
After this, users with course editing rights can add this activity in
the same manner as the normal forum.
Although we have not changed the table layout for the tables that also
exist in the standard forum, there is currently no method for importing
the contents of such a forum into our activity. However, this should be
easily possible by copying the data manually.
The text of the conditions for anonymous posting can be found in the
file .../mod/forumanon/lang/xx/forumanon.php, where xx is the language
(currently either 'en' or 'de'), in the line starting with:
$string['anonconditiontext'] =
and it can be changed as needed (but note that using the single quote
character (') in your text requires it to be prefixed with a backslash:
\').
FUTURE WORK
We had initially hoped to be able to implement the ideas of MDL-22275,
but the present concept there does not seem practical. We expect,
however, that eventually similar features will be implemented in Moodle
and the standard forum adjusted to use them.
In the meantime, possible extensions to our fork might include a UI for
revealing user identities, a means of enforcing or denying anonymous
posting for specific users and the integration of new changes to the
standard forum into the forked code.
We have no specific plans to carry out this work, but interested parties
may use our git repository at https://github.com/elkinam/forumanon and
contact us at margarita.elkina@hwr-berlin.de if they wish.