Kate Boardman wrote:

> And while I'm here - just a comment to be potentially aware of: when you
> copy courses or organisations (5.5.1) we are consistently finding that
> messages on the discussion board which were posted as anonymous reappear
> with their names attached.

This is very worrying from the confidentiality (not to mention dishonesty)
perspective.
If students believe their identity is hidden by anonymity (this should be
maintained unless there is some abuse of the provision, and even then this
should be investigated in case the user concerned has been a victim of
impersonation).

Is Bb doing anything to fix this? I guess this happens for the same reason that
all messages get reset to the date they were copied! Does anyone know if this
happens when you archive and later import as well?


> Therefore somehow a similar type of instruction to the
> one Herta offers here must be able to identify the authors of inapproriate
> anonymous message postings.

Interesting to note that you can track anonymous postings and possibly other
activity within the system  - if you know where to look ;) Surely users should
be made aware of this potential monitoring of their activity that they are led
to believe is private?

--

A example (for comments please) concerning anonymity and control of users
behaviour:

In our (L3/LS) community area - which incidentally is accessible to guests -
the discussion board was set to allow discussion forums to be freely created.
The creator of the forum was not identifiable (to my knowledge). This was
intended to encouraged people to start discussions that they wanted others to
join in with - rather than having to justify your request to start a forum
before you are allowed to start one. There were some overtly political forums
started - which interestingly did actually generate some discussions - but
these have since been removed and the facility removed. Currently, you are not
able to start or even request a new discussion forum at all (even though there
is nothing to stop you simply posting your - political or controversial -
comment elsewhere).

In light of this I was wondering what policies or explicit controls others have
enforced on their systems:

How many institutions have enabled the guest/preview facility?
Did you realise this included the communities area and the discussions?

Do you allow users to change their own personal details?
One of our students has chosen to change their surname to an expletive - not
sure if this is a comment on their name or simply a method of providing
feedback about the BlackBoard system?

What other controls or freedoms have you implemented?

--

You can see our system working yourself via:
http://online.linst.ac.uk

--

I do hope this isn't too political for the list ;)

cheers,
ben


> On Behalf Of Herta Van den
> Eynde
> Sent: 30 October 2002 12:33 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Inappropriate emails
>
> Don't know what platform you're on, but you can probably 'translate'
> from linux + oracle.
>
> First check out /usr/local/blackboard/tools/logs/email.log to get
> information about the offending email.  Let's assume it was sent by
> someone who changed his/her email to "[log in to unmask]".
>
> Next, open your database, and execute the equivalent of
> SQL> select * from msg_main
>       where posted_email = [log in to unmask]
>       order by dtcreated;
> pick out the record you're looking for, and note down the users_pk1
> field.  Let's assume it is 1001.
> Now all you have to do is find out which user is 1001:
> SQL> select * from users
>       where pk1 = 1001;
>
> Normal suspect treatment applies.

--