mod forum-subscriptions

Feature proposal/specification for increased granularity to mod_forum subscription digest settings

Summary

To reduce the amount of e-mail that users receive, but still allow them to be notified of changes, this proposal suggests adding granularity to the user Daily Digest options. Specifically, this feature proposal suggests adding a per-forum Daily Digest setting rather than a per-user setting.

Background

We've encountered a number of issues relating to forum subscriptions, and the granularity of the options within them. These broadly fit into four groups:

1. inability for some staff to unsubscribe from forced subscription forums;
2. inability for other staff to subscribe to forced subscription forums;
3. too much e-mail from forums that users are not interested in;
4. too much e-mail from forum threads that users are not interested in.

Several of these issues may be addressed shortly by MDL-39707 and MDL-40483:

• The issue of forum thread subscription will be resolved by MDL-39707 if it is implemented, however I don't believe that the rest will based on the descriptions available; and
• MDL-40483 attempts to address the first two issues by introducing a new capability which allows you to define which users can unsubscribe from a forum.

However, there is still a lack of granularity for forum subscriptions on the whole and this is the final area that this proposal seeks to address.

Proposal in brief

At present, forum digest settings are a user profile setting and the same setting applies to every forum in Moodle. As a solution to the issue described, the proposal we're putting forward is to introduce additional granularity to the forum subscription type that users may choose. This will:

• convert the existing user profile digest setting into a user default preference; and
• add a per-forum instance setting for each user to select the digest preference.

Effectively, this will give each user the option of whether they wish to receive a digest e-mail, or a single e-mail for each of their forums.

Changes required

User profile settings

Wording will be changed to indicate that the setting selected is the user's default setting.

mod_forum UI changes

The existing per-course forum index (/mod/forum/index.php?id=X) will be updated to display the current subscription settings. This information may also be displayed on a summary page for all forums a user is subscribed to (depending on performance aspects).

Where a user has the appropriate capability to both subscribe and unsubscribe from a forum's email notifications, a dropdown with these options will be displayed. Where they are unable to change their subscription options, text/an icon will be displayed indicating that that they cannot change their subscription and what their current subscription status is.

The current subscription setting will be a dropdown with options:

• Profile Default - always reflects the current profile field setting;
• Single e-mail - always send an e-mail per forum discussion;
• Daily Digest Complete - send a daily e-mail each day with the complete contents of each post in this forum;
• Daily Digest Subjects - send a daily e-mail each day with the subject of each post in this forum;

mod_forum back-end changes

To cater for this, the forum_subscriptions table will be modified to incorporate any overrides to the standard settings. The following fields will be added

type | length | default value | nullable |

int | 1 | -1 | not null |

No additional database call is required for this, but the existing call to retrieve a list of all forums will be modified to outer join the forum_subscriptions table against the current user.

A single_select will be used to change the selection.

TODO

• navigation changes to show and allow cyclic toggling of the setting?
• improve perf of cron so it does not make an additional call per forum per message per user (on developed PoC patch)
• determine UI changes required
• UI mockups