Notification for global roles

1 Description

Owner of global roles should be notified automatically about new postings in a discussion forum. They do not need to activate the forum notification manually. It is already set for all members. This possibility should be activated generally in the administration global forum settings.
The subtab "Notifications" under the "Edit Properties" ("Settings") would be extended with setting the global role by checkboxes. So you can enable notification for guest-, Anonymous- or other global roles in categories or other objects in the repository, where you can place the object "forum" generally.
It is important, that users of global roles can disable the default value for notification themselves.

2 Status

• Scheduled for: Not scheduled yet
• Funding: Funded by
• Development: Feature is to be developed by

3 Additional Information

• For any questions and more info, please contact: Rene Sens (Bundesverwaltungsamt) using rene.sens@bva.bund.de

4 Discussion

Michael Jansen, 14 May 2014: I support this request in general, but there are some open questions which should be discussed.

• Which global roles should be avaiable as candidates for ,the notifications in a specific forum? Given the feature is activated in the global ILIAS forum administration: Should a moderator of a concrete Forum Example (who does not necessarily should have permissions to act on global roles) be able to activate the notifications for e.g. the Administrator role?
• It is not guaranteed, that every user assigned to a global role has access to the specific forum. How and where should these users be able to disable the notification?
• What happens if a moderator activates the notifications for one or many global roles (technical question)?

• • Option 1) If the moderator submits the form, ILIAS has to adopt all assigned users in the forum notification.
    • Pros:
      • It is explicitly defined which users should receive a notifcation. We do not need to determine the assigned users if a notication event is triggered.
      • Because there is an explicit data set for each subsribed user the mechanism to unsubscribe (if access to the forum is permitted) would be easy to implement.
    • Cons:
      • We need additional events if a user is assigned to or detached from a global role to maintain the forum notification tables. Furthermore we have to implement an event listener which can handle these events for the forum purposes.
  • Option 2) If the moderator submits the form, ILIAS only stores the information, that these roles should receive notifications 
    • Pros:
      • No further events and event listeners are necessary.
    • Cons:
      • Because we would only store the roles which should receive notifications we would have to determine all assigned users if a notification event is triggered (maybe a performance issue).
      • The behaviour to unsubscribe requires more conceptional/implementation effort. We would need a further database table to store explicitly that a user does not want to receive notifications of a specific forum even if assigned roles should receice notifications.