In Moodle, which roles appear as participants and which don't?
In Moodle 1.7 it seems that admins don’t show up as participants in individual Moodle sites. WRONG. They shouldn’t but they do as well. See the note from Ricardo Garcia below. Are there any other roles that hide that way? Is it something we can turn on for a given role?
One use case we’re trying to solve is that we need to give dept. webtechs permissions to view, edit and update and assign roles to their class sites, but we don’t want all their names showing up in the Participants list and confusing the instructor.
Answer: The reason the admins don’t show up as participants in individual Moodle sites is because of their permission Capabilities/moodle/site:doanything. Documentation of this permission can be found here.
As of 04-05-07 the documentation states:
- This allows a user to execute all actions in Moodle in the given context (normally the whole Moodle system). This is a special capability intended for admins, since it overrides all other capability settings.
- This also allows a user to browse every course without being required to enrol and without being listed as a course participant.
However, this is not exactly what we’re looking for because it does not allow a user to be hidden from the Participants list and have limited actions.
An identical feature request to our own was recently posted in the Moodle foums.
A possible workaround which is available in later versions (1.8) involves the usage of hidden assignments. To hide a user, click the “Hidden assignments” check box before adding them to the existing users list. They will not show up as participants unless the user viewing them has the capability viewhiddenassigns. Both teachers and admins have this capability. If we want teachers to not see these hidden users, we have to remove their viewhiddenassigns capability.
Ricardo’s research: This is the target of the “People” block from when you click on the page. Here is a link to compare the version in CCLE with the newest version in the 1.7 branch).
There are three subsequent attempts to fix this problem (1.142.2.1, 1.142.2.5, 1.142.2.8), as well as one more to hide hidden roles (1.142.2.11).