Managing course support forums

This information relates to the CSE Support Forums. Specifically, it is for course managers and lecturers who administer the courses.

To ease the burden on everyone, there is a special script available that provides limited 'Administrator' abilities. This script is called priv manage-forums.

To create a set of forums for your course, run (replacing COMP1234 with your course code):


priv manage-forums COMP1234 add-course

Getting Help

For a list of commands that can be run with this script, run:

priv manage-forums help

For each sub-command, you can get help by giving that command help as the first argument. Note that you still need the course code:

priv manage-forums COMP1234 list-access help

General usage notes

All forum and group names managed by the script are automatically prefixed with the course code, so there is no need to use the course code in the forum/group names.

Groups

There are several groups that are automatically managed by the CSE Systems:

Students - This group contains all students (and staff) of the subject
Teachers - This group contains all subject staff (tutors, supervisors and lecturers)
Admins - This group contains all subject lecturers and supervisors (including the course account)

Otherwise, you can create, delete and change group memberships using the following commands (extracted from help):


        create-group - Create a new subject group
        delete-group - Delete a group and all its permissions
            groupadd - add a user to a group
            groupdel - remove a user from a group
          list-group - List all groups, or list all group members

Use priv manage-forums COMP1234 help for more information on each.

Creating and Deleting forums

The forum deleting operation is the most complicated, and we thus ask that you think carefully before creating new forums so that you do not have to delete anything frequently.

Permissions

Permissions in the forums are applied at two levels. First, each forum has a default set of permissions. These can be modified using the change-forum-access command. Then, if a default permission on a forum is set to 'private', you must specify access by group - which is the second form of permissions.

To view current permissions on a forum, we recommend the use of the access-info option: priv manage-forums COMP1234 access-info forum_name

There are several types of permissions you can set. These are listed in the help for change-group-access and change-forum-access. Most are self-explanatory. Note that view means that people will be able to see the forums in listings, and read means they will be able to read posts. If they don't have view access, but do have read access, then they can read the forum using a direct URL - it just won't be in the indexes.

Default forum permissions

From the change-forum-access help:


change-forum-access - Change default access permissions for a forum
Usage: change-forum-access    ...
 Where the perms you can change are:
 view, read, post, reply, edit, delete, sticky, announce, vote, pollcreate, attachments
 And the leading option can be:
  .  (public) completely public (only available for view and read)
  *  (registered) all registered users
  =  (private) only explicitly granted access by groups (use change-group-access)
  !  (moderators) only moderators

If no changes are specified, then a listing of the current permissions is given

We strongly discourage setting any permissions to "completely public", as then anyone on the internet can post to it (including ad-bots). The script disallows public access for all but the read and view permissions.

Note that forum moderators can be setup using the add-moderator and del-moderator commands.

Note also that all newly created subforums are automatically setup with the same default permissions as the primary forum, but NO group permissions.

Group permissions

If your forum has permissions marked as private, then access is determined by looking up a set of group or user-based permissions. These permissions can be setup using the change-group-access command. Use priv manage-forums COMP1234 help change-group-access for more information.

Note that group permissions aren't as complicated as default perms. You simply have to add (+) or remove (-) a permission.

Examples

If you wish to restrict read and view access for your Main forum to only your students:

First, we see what the current permissions are:


$ priv manage-forums COMP1234 change-forum-access Main
Default permissions for Main: (key is in help)
.view *read =post =reply =edit !delete !sticky !announce =vote =pollcreate =attachments

So we need to change view and read permissions to be private:


$ priv manage-forums COMP1234 change-forum-access Main =view =read

We can view the current group-based permissions on the Main forum:


$ priv manage-forums COMP1234  access-info Main
Forum access for COMP1234 Main:

Moderators: COMP1234 Admins

Forum Access:
        Type Who
  ========== ===================
       view: PRIVATE, but no groups specified, so no-one
       read: PRIVATE, but no groups specified, so no-one
       post: MODERATORS
      reply: MODERATORS
       edit: COMP1234 Admins, COMP1234 Teachers, COMP1234 Students
     delete: MODERATORS
     sticky: MODERATORS
   announce: MODERATORS
       vote: COMP1234 Admins, COMP1234 Teachers, COMP1234 Students
 pollcreate: COMP1234 Admins, COMP1234 Teachers, COMP1234 Students
attachments: COMP1234 Admins, COMP1234 Teachers, COMP1234 Students

So, we need to allow our student and teaching groups to view and read our forum:


$ priv manage-forums COMP1234 change-group-access Main Students +view +read
$ priv manage-forums COMP1234 change-group-access Main Teachers +view +read

And we're done!

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Course forums