27 February 2014, 2:31

Hi,

can I set up an automatic reminder when Users reach a certain percentage of their quota? If not, would that be a valuable idea for the file-extension or would I rather put that in a separate extension?

And is there, by the way, a search function for this forum?

Tobias

02 March 2014, 22:47

Hello Tobias,

Search function: We are working on getting fulltext search working so that you can search forums more comfortably. For the time being, Google would be the best bet.

I think having a reminder when users reach a certain percentage would be a great idea. Do you intend to have the notification sent to users only or do you think admins should also have a report on the user quota? The former would already be a great addition I think and the latter a bonus.

Cheers

Kristina

12 March 2014, 0:12

Hello Kristina,

thanks for the feedback. We were primarily thinking on notifying the users but it may also be a good idea to inform the admin, especially with users that are not overly technophiliac. 

The only view where the admin can see the quota of the user is in the account settings, in grey text under the File Quota setting, right? Might also be usefull to have that info in the site statistics or the admin user search, I guess. But for now we're just working on the notifications. 

Cheers

Tobias

12 March 2014, 4:38

Hello,

Here is my two cents worth:

I am using Mahara in my research about portfolio as process in public schools in Sharjah, UAE. One of the main concerns particpants have is with security of their data.

By having them put all of their work in their own personal accounts (Twitter, Flickr, Google Drive or DropBox, Blogger, youtube, vimeo, etc), they can still provide access to any documentation, but yet maintain ultimate control over their work.

A second aspect of security is that if the site itself goes down, or they leave the project, all they have lost is the time spent to embed their work, which is minimal compared to the time spent arranging their original accoutns and the work itself of course.

In this manner, you will never need to woprry about file quotas or your own server space.

12 March 2014, 20:18

Hi Paul,

thanks for your input. I like the idea of connecting the data that the users already have uploaded on other platforms (like youtube, vimeo, etc) or want to access from other computers (and thus put on dropbox, etc). There are reasons though for (our) users to store the files directly on mahara:

First we have one mahara set up for a group of users that are generally not very experienced with web technologies so we don't want to teach them other tools beside mahara and confuse them with extra accounts/passwords. 

Second, here in Europe right now people are more concerned about another aspect of security: confidentiality. So in some setups, where the data is not intended to be shared publically, people don't want to upload their files on international/non-european servers. And from what I understand about Mahara, it is one of it's key features to give users control about with whom to share their artefacts. 

About your first argument on security: Do your users feel they have more control about their data if they upload it on an external site and then integrate it into Mahara? 

And finally, though I am speaking rather from a technical background, I think that the idea of portfolio work is, to spend considerable time on reflection and presentation of your work, so encouraging users to upload their files on external sites doesn't rid you of setting up a backup for your mahara ;) Though I get your point, especially about keeping the data when the user leaves the platform. 

Cheers

Tobias

23 March 2014, 16:50

Hello Tobias,

You are correct. Currently, the file quota is only displayed on the accounts settings page. You can see the one with the highest quota in the statistics. I'd not put all users' quota into the statistics as they are more anonymous statistics than user stats and thus would opt for including them in the user search. Instead of making that table there even bigger, what about including it in the reports?

Cheers

Kristina

15 April 2014, 23:19

I registered a bug under https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/1307935 and uploaded a first version of the patch. https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/1307935 

There are some things I'm not happy with and there are two ideas I'd like to bring into discussion here: 

• The system remembers when a user has been notified about his quota reaching a certain porcentage and won't notify again until his quota percentage falls below the certain limit (by deleting files or by the admin changing the quota setting or the limit for notification). I thought about unflagging the user (removing the state as notified for his quota, if he's below the threshold) with a cronjob that runs only once per night. That way I would get rid of the database triggers. On the other hand, I'm not sure if a quota-aware user is happy not to recieve too many notifications when he uploads and deletes files in a row and passes the limit several times - or if he rather is irritated if he gets notified, deletes a big file, uploads another and doesn't get a notification again. 
• There might be only a few big files filling the quota so we thought about adding listing the like 5/10 biggest files to point the user towards rethinking if maybe he could do with resized pictures instead for example, rising awareness for this matter. Worth the effort? 
• The quota-bar could be colored orange as a warning when it's filled beyond the threshold but not yet 100%. Though I think that all themes would have to be revised because the different conditions so far are idicated by different ids instead of different classes (so there is no generic quota bar definition that could be overwritten with another color for the yellow/orange state)

So far we are working on the notification and not yet on the display for the administrator. What reports did you mean?