[Building Sakai] permisions in forums

[Kara Stiles]

Very strange indeed.

Not sure if I can solve your problem, but I can give you more information
about Forum permissions.

As you've noticed, the Forums tool has its own roles (Contributor, Author,
etc.)

To ensure that the custom roles you've built in your site are "mapping"
correctly to the Forums roles (permissions for which you can find in the
first six rows of the mfr_permission_level_t table), you should create
settings like these (using your own roles, of course) in your property file
(don't forget to restart):

mc.default.Student=Contributor
mc.default.Instructor=Owner
mc.default.Guest=Reviewer
mc.default.Teaching\ Assistant=Author
mc.default.Tech\ Support=Owner

Adding settings like these will ensure that your custom site roles map
correctly to the Forum roles.  If you make this change, I do not believe
existing Forums/Topics will be affected, but new ones will.

Regarding your testing with the students and SU - I'm not sure what to make
of that.  As far as I know, the Forums tool allows you to set permissions by
role or by group/section, but not for an individual.  I would investigate
whether you are using groups or sections in that site and whether those
users in question are members of a group that may have been granted extra
permissions.

I'd also suggest logging in as a real "student" instead of using SU.  While
I love SU as a tool for testing, everyone once in awhile I get strange
results when using it.

Good luck.

Thanks,
Kara

2010/11/4 José Mariano Luján González <jmariano at um.es>

>  Hi,
> This is Mariano, from the University of Murcia (Spain), we are currently
> running sakai 2.7.1 and we are experiencing something really weird with the
> use of the forums tool. We have set up custom types of sites and roles but
> following the same templates as the type of site course and the roles
> instructor, TA and student. So in forums, as you might know, there are a set
> of permissions that the owner of the forum can customize for each role of
> the site. For example, the instructor (owner of the forum) can customize, by
> cliking in *"Forum settings",* the student role and set their permissions
> so that they act like owner too. In our case, by default, for the role
> student, they act like a contributor, not an owner. So a student can only
> post new threads but not create forums, topics and of course, not customize
> forums. So a student should never see the menu option "Forum settings" and
> not either the opction "Delete". That initial configuration seems to come
> because sakai is mapping the section.role.student permission to the
> contributor role in forums, so a student would be a contributor and the
> instructor who has section.role.instructor permission is the owner. Until
> here, everything seems to work fine but we have found out that in some
> random cases, some students can customize the permissions in forums because
> they see the menu options "*Forum settings*" and "*Delete*". This students
> have a site role which is the same as the default student role from sakai
> and of course, they don´t have site.upd permission. The weird thing about it
> is that a student with for example 6 courses (6 different sites but with
> same permissions and roles), would only see this in one site. But if we take
> a look at the permissions, we see that he has the student role in the site
> and that student role has the contributor role in forums with the option
> "Change settings" uncheked so it doesn´t make any sense at all...
> Since we are piloting right now, to do some research about this weird
> thing, we have used the tool "Become user" in production with real students
> in order to check with 7 different students but with the same courses (6
> courses from the same degree). It only happened twice but 2 different
> students in two different courses. Its weird, right?? We have tried to find
> a pattern with those users but nothing makes them unique from the other 5
> users, it seems very random... If anyone have experienced something similar
> or have an idea of what the problem could be, please let us know!
> Thanks in advance!
> Mariano
>
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