Anonymous Users

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Moodle 2.0

Objective

To allow users to switch into an anonymous mode when using certain activities eg when posting to a forum, so that the user's real identity cannot be ascertained by other non-privileged users.

Possible Use Cases

1. Activity: for example a forum may be switched into anonymous mode by teacher rendering all posts anonymous.
2. User: a user may choose to participate in an activity anonymously. In this case the teacher would switch the activity into an optional mode. For example, the forum module, when posting to a forum in an optional anonymous mode, the student could choose at the time of posting whether the post should be anonymous;
3. Role Play: a teacher may choose to run the whole course in an anonymous mode to allow students to role play. In this case the anonymous mode will be forced to "yes" in the course settings.

Settings

Global

• Anonymous Mode: On/Off
• Anonymous Images: On/Off
• Enable Course Anonymous Mode: On/Off

Course

• Anonymous Mode: On/Off/Optional

Activity

• Anonymous Mode: On/Off/Optional

User Profile

The following additional fields will be added

• Alias
• Alias image

Code Changes

New Table

A new table user_course_alias will be added

field	type	description
id	int	autoincrement
userid	int	id from the user table
courseid	int	id from the course table
alias	string	the user's alias for this given course

Core Code

The fullname function in lib/moodlelib.php will need to be changed. Currently it is defined as:

function fullname($user, $override=false)

where the user object is only required to contain firstname and lastname properties.

Proposed changes are:

function fullname($user, $override=false, $courseid=null, $link=false, $anonymous=null, $viewanonymous=false)

where the user object is required to contain firstname, lastname, alias

So what do we return?

$anonymous	$viewanonymous	return example
no	no	firstname lastname
no	yes	firstname lastname
yes	no	alias
yes	yes	alias (firstname lastname)

backwards compatbility

• If no anonymous mode is given then we check the current context to see if anonymous mode should be running. Check activity, course, global settings and determine anonymity status. We can grab the current context from the $PAGE object, otherwise find another way to do it.
• If no alias property is defined in the user object then we return get_string('anonymoususer') ie a global, default string;