Move posts between forums within groups

[Gordon McLeod]

Feature request.

Hi,
While working on the structure of the MacHara user group in Mahara.org it occurred to me that as the content started to develop within the group some posts in the general forum would be better situated in other forums created after those posts were originally written. It would be a useful feature if posts could be re-organised by moving them to other forums within the group.

In the same context I use a Mahara group within my institution to provide resources and support forums for using different tools and technology. If someone posts a question about Mahara (for example) in the Moodle forum it would be useful to be able to move it to the correct place so that the response can be found by others looking for the information.
I guess there might also be use cases for being able to move/copy a discussion topic or post to a completely different group - but I think being able to manage information within a group would be of wider value.

Regards, Gordon.

[Kristina Hoeppner (kris-hoeppner)]

Hi Gordon,

This is a great proposal. Moodle has that possiblity and it comes in hand y from time to time when you can move an entire forum topic to a different forum.

Cheers
Kristina

[Aaron Wells (u-aaronw)]

I was just wishing for this functionality on mahara.org the other day, as well. :)

It would be a relatively easy thing to implement, so I'm tagging it with the new "snack-sized" tag, which indicates that it's bigger than bite-sized but still small. From a data perspective, all you have to do is change the value of interaction_forum_topic.forum in the database. Thankfully our URLs for forum posts just have the topic & post id, not the forum ID, so it wouldn't even break URLs pointing to the topic.

The only sticky bit I can think of is subscriptions -- when you move a post into a new forum, to that forum's subscribers get notified? I think whoever implements this can probably look at how other forums handle this scenario in order to get an idea of best practice.

Also, I think the way subscription notifications get queued, you could move a topic to a different forum before the emails go out, and then subscribers to the topic's original forum would get an email about it, and they may be confused why they're getting an email about a forum they're not subscribed to.

But I don't think either of those are insurmountable problems.

Cheers,
Aaron

[Mahara Bot (dev-mahara)]

Patch for "master" branch: https://reviews.mahara.org/3142

[Mahara Bot (dev-mahara)]

Reviewed: https://reviews.mahara.org/3142
Committed: http://gitorious.org/mahara/mahara/commit/c5d193476adb5738e17958f0cec93af2ff2b9147
Submitter: Robert Lyon (<email address hidden>)
Branch: master

commit c5d193476adb5738e17958f0cec93af2ff2b9147
Author: Son Nguyen <email address hidden>
Date: Mon Mar 31 13:45:00 2014 +1300

Move topics forums within a group (Bug 1231316)

- Add a new action 'moveto'
- Get the list of other forums in a group
- Update the interaction_forum_topic table
- Send notifications to the new forum's subscribers
- Update the help file

Change-Id: I99ada6003b340e65f11bddfebced759f5865429a
Signed-off-by: Son Nguyen <email address hidden>