Forum care
| Forum care | |
|---|---|
| Type | Local plugin |
| Set | N/A |
| Downloads | https://moodle.org/plugins/local_forumcare |
| Issues | https://github.com/adamjenkins/moodle-local_forumcare/issues |
| Discussion | https://moodle.org/plugins/local_forumcare |
| Maintainer(s) | Adam Jenkins (WiseCat) |
Forum care is a local plugin that lets students report problem posts in forums. Reports go privately to the teachers, who review them in a queue. Optional thresholds can hide a post or suspend a user automatically after enough reports, so a forum stays safe even before a teacher has looked.
Installation
Install the plugin from the Moodle plugins directory, or download the ZIP file and follow Installing plugins. The files go in the folder local/forumcare. The plugin supports Moodle 5.0 to 5.3.
After installation:
- Check the thresholds in Site administration > Plugins > Local plugins > Forum care (see Site settings).
- Add at least one report reason, with the Report reasons link at the bottom of that page.
- Turn on reporting in each forum where you want it (see below). Reporting is off in every forum until a teacher turns it on.
Turning on reporting in a forum
- Open the forum's settings.
- Expand the Forum care section and tick Enable "Report this post" for this forum.
- Optionally, change this forum's thresholds. Set a threshold to 0 to turn that protection off for this forum only.
- Save.
Reporting a post
In a forum with reporting turned on, each post by someone else has a Report this post link, at the start of the post's links, apart from Reply so that it is not clicked by mistake.
- Click Report this post.
- Choose the Reason for reporting and, optionally, add Additional details.
- Click Report post.
The dialog says clearly that a report is not a reply: it goes privately to the forum's moderators and does not appear in the forum. Once a student has reported a post, the link changes to Post reported. Students can report only posts they can see.
Reviewing reports
Teachers open the review queue from More > Forum care in the course. It lists pending reports and reports reviewed in the last 7 days; Show all reports lists the rest. It can be filtered by Forum, Reporter and Reportee, and sorted by any column. The post, forum and people link to their pages.
For each report, a teacher can:
- Mark as OK: the post is fine (and is shown again if it was hidden).
- Hide post: replace the post with a notice that a moderator has hidden it. The original text is kept, and Mark as OK restores it.
- Mark as frivolous: the report was not justified. Students whose reports are marked frivolous too often are blocked from reporting (see the thresholds below).
- Suspend user in this course: suspend the author's enrolment in the course.
- Suspend user site-wide: suspend the author's account (for users with the capability to do so).
- Undo review: return a reviewed report to pending. Actions already taken, such as a suspension, are not undone.
Moderators (site administrators, and anyone who can review reports or update the course) are never suspended, automatically or by hand. The plugin does not delete posts: use the forum's own Delete instead.
Automatic actions
- A post is hidden automatically once it has the set number of open reports. The notice says that it is hidden pending a moderator's review. If its author edits a hidden post, it stays hidden.
- A user's enrolment in the course is suspended once the set number of different students have open reports against their posts. One student reporting many posts cannot trigger it alone.
- Optionally, set by administrators only, a user's account is suspended once the set number of different users have reported them across the whole site.
- A student whose reports have been marked frivolous the set number of times can no longer affect anything: their new reports are recorded but not counted. They see no difference.
Report reasons
The site's report reasons (for example Offensive language or Overuse of AI) are offered in every course. A teacher can use a course's own list instead, from More > Forum care report reasons in the course: tick Override the site-wide default report reasons for this course and add the course's reasons.
A reason that has been used in reports cannot be deleted, so that those reports stay reviewable. Disable it instead to stop offering it.
Site settings
In Site administration > Plugins > Local plugins > Forum care:
- Enable forum care: the switch for the whole site. When it is off, nobody can report posts, whatever each forum's setting.
- Moderation thresholds, the defaults for every forum:
- Reports before auto-hide (default 3)
- Reports before course suspension (default 5)
- Reports before site-wide suspension (default 0, off). Teachers cannot change or trigger this one.
- Frivolous reports before reporting is blocked (default 3)
- Manage report reasons: the Report reasons link to the site's reasons.
Capabilities
- local/forumcare:report (Report a forum post): students, non-editing teachers, teachers and managers.
- local/forumcare:reviewreports (Review forum post reports): non-editing teachers, teachers and managers.
- local/forumcare:managecoursereasons (Manage course-level forum report reasons): teachers and managers.
- local/forumcare:managereasons (Manage forum report reasons): managers.
- local/forumcare:suspendsitewide (Suspend a user site-wide from the forum report review page): managers.
Privacy
The plugin stores who reported which post, why, and how each report was reviewed, and keeps the original text of hidden posts so that it can be restored. It implements the Privacy API in full. Because a report is shared between the reporter, the author and the reviewer, deleting a user's data removes that user's identifying details from the report (and blanks a reporter's comment) rather than deleting the report, which others still need. Uninstalling the plugin restores the original text of every hidden post. See Data privacy.
