Forum notifications as messages

Moodle 2.0

WARNING: Under construction RIGHT NOW!

The problems

Forum notifications are now done via the messaging system rather than by the forum sending out emails itself. Unfortunately forum notifications then appear on /message/index.php which is proving to be annoying and confusing on a site with busy forums. There two closely related problems:

• Each forum post notification consumes a lot of screen real estate. See the below screenshot for an example. This makes the whole interface less usable as it requires lots of scrolling past unnecessary and repeated items of text.

• Forum notifications appear to be coming from the author of the forum post and so are displayed among personal messages exchanged by the two users. For example if two users, Mary and John, are having a conversation via personal messages and Mary posts in a forum, John's notification of that post will appear among their personal messages as if it were a personal message from Mary. This is potentially confusing and interupts the flow of conversation.

Possible solutions

• Reduce the real estate consumed by forum notifications and visually differentiate them from personal messages using css. With IMs the version that is displayed on /message/index.php doesn't include the footer that is appended to the version that is emailed out. This condenses their display and prevents the inclusion of standard boilerplate like "This is a copy of a message posted on the CF101 website." being displayed over and over. The messaging system could be enhanced to allow the calling code to supply a header and footer which could be included in the emails but then discarded. Additionally, css could visually differentiate IMs from notifications.

• Differentiate messages and notifications.

• Try to avoid putting forum notifications through the messaging system.

• Are there any other alternatives?