Forum for kids

[dhassen]

Does anyone know of any free forums we could set up so that kids could access and ask about homework / ask a teacher type thing?

Censorship and knowing who said what etc would be issues....

any ideas.??

1st post by the way... hey everyone!

Dave

[ChrisH]

I believe moodle has this functionality.

[dhassen]

very quick!

I'll give it a look.. cheers

[dhassen]

hmmmm not checked propperly yet...

but I don't want any old so-and so to be able to create an account, nor do I want lil johnny briggs to set up an accout as 'nobead' or something like that...

u think that'll be a problem... we could use all the kids logins or admin numbers and give them the ability to change their passsword...

[webman]

If you have a Windows AD domain with IIS on the server(s) you might want to look at http://www.2enetworx.com/dev/projects/openforum.asp which you could tweak to use Integrated Windows Authentication.

[Geoff]

hmmmm not checked propperly yet...

but I don't want any old so-and so to be able to create an account, nor do I want lil johnny briggs to set up an accout as 'nobead' or something like that...

u think that'll be a problem... we could use all the kids logins or admin numbers and give them the ability to change their passsword...

You can disable registration in Moodle and use an external system to authenticate against. Be it a database, flat file, or Active Directory.

[russdev]

also if got some weir and wonderful system in place then can always do what they have done in our lea the lea single sign on passes the data to moodle and then moodle import all correct into own database...

so only way of getting in is first coming via single sign on

russ

[alan-d]

Try this

Easy to set up and mod also easy to delete later if it turns out to be a waste of time

Snitz Forums

[dhassen]

right brilliant... loads to go on there..... i think i'll try moodle first, especially if you can use exsiting login data.... thanks people, much appreciated

[andy]

You can disable registration in Moodle and use an external system to authenticate against. Be it a database, flat file, or Active Directory.

Authenticating against AD sounds very sensible to me. Presumably this would be "Pro" point for hosting Moodle locally rather than using a County hosted one - am I correct? (Or could you still get a county one to look at your AD setup?)



Andy.

[Geoff]

Correct. Plus the massive speed increase of having it on a dedicated machine.

County cannot 'see' our AD servers due to firewalling to prevent the spread of windows worms.

[ZeroHour]

Hehe I used phpBB for our forum here and created my own AD auth system to get usernames and lock it all down to stop kiddies abusing. Before I was tech here I was webmaster and designed our PHP/MySQL intranet from scratch myself.
It works rather well. Mad cool granular admin system too.

[Norphy]

SMF is also a free forum system and there is an LDAP authentication module for it. I use SMF on my personal website and I think its a whole lot better than phpBB.

Moodle is nice but forums are not really the object of the software. Its discussion forums are rather basic and I don't think they're formatted very well either.

[dhassen]

woah again thanks....

I'm not sure about using active direcory etc but I just wondered if I could set up users based on info from a spreadsheet or something.. nothing over complicated.... We run an apache server with php and mysql already onboard so a php my sql forum should be fine... such as phpBB .. im also going to look into SMF... thanks Norphy... and I've heard elsewhere that using moodle for forums alone would be overkill.... but if we want VLE then that'd be a good start..

anyway... I think phpBB or SMF sound like a good start...

I think AD for authentication and VLEs are down the road a little for now

Thanks again