CUNY Academic Commons

perfectly described. thanks so much for submitting, Luke

Thanks, Boone-- this is all good to know.

I think the faculty in question are using sites without linked groups, as they were concerned about the additional overheard of a group. I'm adding Paul to the discussion, as he's doing something similar in a course he's teaching on the Commons and can help us think this through.

Extending Participant status to Authors seems like a good solution, but I'd be curious to know how many folks are running BBPress on sites rather than groups... that will help us determine whether its worth the dev time. Other thoughts? Even a warning flag in the User view when BBPress is active explaining why there are so many Participants would be beneficial...

I think the faculty in question are using sites without linked groups, as they were concerned about the additional overheard of a group.

I figured as much - I was just making sure the options were covered.

I'd be curious to know how many folks are running BBPress on sites rather than groups

32 secondary sites have bbPress active, at least one of which is obviously a test site. It's likely that the plugin is active but not in use on some of them. So the number is low.

I'm not opposed to doing some magic like the Participant->Author trick, but this kind of magic can also introduce some confusion, for example if you're an instructor whose students are merely Contributors, or in the rare case where someone wants the bbPress permissions on a site to be more restrictive than regular posting permissions. So we'd need documentation of one sort or another. A simple warning flag on users.php would be more straightforward, something we could probably do right away.

I didn't know, until I read Laurie's notes, that visitors were being logged as participants. Everyone who was in the list was a student of ours except for two--Boone and Luke. I figured you two had added yourselves since I'd had a request in to each of you for different things (being naive goes a long way).

All of that is to say... I don't know that it would have ever been a problem. I did turn off the setting after I read Laurie's report, though, so there's no way to find out unless I went back into setting (which I'm okay with, if for no other reason to experiment).

So maybe it's not a big deal? If a note is made on the plugin guide, it might be enough.

I think labeling users.php to make faculty aware that the default is all commons-registered site visitors will be added as participants to the forum is a good first step for now. The mote could include the suggestion that faculty turn off this default after all students have been added to site.

This doesn't address the issue that while this feature is turned on, the professor can't actually control who posts to the forum on their site. For now however, the number of faculty using this plugin is low and have already had to mitigate this issue on their current sites. In the future, since we better understand the functionality of this plugin faculty can be informed in order to determine whether they want to use a forum on a site or group.