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Forum user administrationFiled in Notes, ILT on September 18th 05 . A colleague wanted to support a wide range of classes (about 20) using a forum where students could ask questions and the local expert could answer them. Moodle can handle this but would have made it difficult for the expert to monitor the asking of questions and the ‘learning curve’ would have been high for students – especially as only a single function was needed. We decided to use a forum running on some commercial Web server space with a blog on the front page for public announcements and so on. The requirements were as follows…
There is a lot of forum software out there – the Open Source phpBB being a popular one installed by default on many Web servers. Alas, many of these otherwise excellent forums do not appear to allow user creation by the admin – you have to allow people to ‘register’ and then use e-mail validation. Two forums that do allow user creation by administrator ‘out of the box’ are
Discus Pro has a very polished user management system with the capability to upload CSV files derived from spreadsheets of user names and the ability to force new users to change their password on first log-in. Gossamer-Threads forum is less feature rich – users have to be created one by one unless you import a users table using phpMySQLadmin – but is cheaper for small projects. A basic Web site using the Gossamer-Threads forum and WordPress as a front end blog can be put together over a weekend and will cost little enough to put on petty cash. This is filed under Notes, ILT. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are closed for this post. |
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