Chat settings

Note: Chat is due to be removed from standard Moodle. See the discussion Deprecation of the Chat Tool.

This page explores in more detail the settings for the Chat activity once you have added it to your course and also covers the Site administration settings.

Note that if you want to edit an existing chat, click the Edit link to its right and choose the action you wish to take, e.g. 'Edit settings'.

General

In the Description, provide instructions for students. Check the box if you want these instructions to display on the course page.

Chat sessions

Next chat time: The day and hour of the next chat session. This will appear in the calendar so students know the schedule but it doesn't stop them accessing the chatroom at any other time.; If you don't want them in the chatroom at other times, then hide it (with the eye icon) or use Restrict access.; If you don't wish to schedule chat times then ignore this and choose from the next settings.

'Note: For courses involving users across different time zones, the time set here will be adjusted to match the time zone of the user viewing it as long as they have set their local time in their profile.

Repeat/publish session times: There are four options for scheduling future chat sessions:

Don't publish any chat times- there are no set times and students are welcome to chat at any time.
No repeats - publish the specified time only- only the Next chat time will be published. This could be used to schedule special events or meetings or simply to help learners identify a common time in which they can expect to find other learners in the chat room.
At the same time every day- Daily chats are useful for scheduling daily office hours or work sessions with learners.
At the same time every week--This setting will schedule a chat for the same day and time every week, which could be useful for instance for meeting and reviewing key ideas and questions related to the week's content/assessment.

Save past chat sessions

Choose from the dropdown how many days to save - or save everything by selecting Never delete messages

If you have any concerns about discussions that might take place in your chat room, you may want to keep transcripts to check the suitablility of what is discussed. If your learners are using the chatroom to collaborate on a group project, you won't want to delete the messages until the project is complete.

Everyone can view past sessions: Decide here whether or not allow everyone to view past chat sessions. (Teachers can always view past sessions)

Common module settings: See Common module settings

Restrict access/Activity completion: These settings are visible if Restrict access and Activity completion have been enabled in the site and the course.

Other settings

Depending on what is enabled for your site and course, you may also need to explore Common module settings, Restrict access, Activity completion, Tags and Competencies

Chat capabilities

Role permissions for the activity can be changed from the gear icon Actions menu.

Site administration settings

The Chat activity has additional settings which may be changed by an administrator in Administration > Site administration > Plugins > Activity modules > Chat. They depend on the chat method which has been selected:

Ajax

This is the default method. It works everywhere but if many people are chatting it can put a large load on the server. Its particular settings are:
- Refresh user list - choose the number of seconds after which the user list is refreshed
- Disconnect timeout - choose the number of seconds after which we detect a user has disconnected.

Normal method

The particular settings for this method are:
- Refresh room - choose the number of seconds after which the room is refreshed
- Update method - choose how to update the chatroom - "Keep alive" or "Stream" strategy. Stream works better but your sever might not support it.

Chat server daemon

A daemon is a program that runs all the time in the background. In this case it's a PHP script, listening to a particular port on your server, accepting and giving out chat information.If you intend to use the chat activity a lot, then you should consider using a chat server daemon to reduce server load.Its particular settings are:
- Server name
- Server IP address
- Server port
- Max users

Then you need to start the chat daemon script from the command line:

cd moodle/mod/chat
php chatd.php --start &

How to stop the chat daemon script:

Moodle staff, please give details!

One option is to restart the server via the command line:

sudo reboot

Documentation