cocalc
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sagemathinc
send email update to all students
add a facility to email all (or a selected few) students in a course.
via: https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-cloud/3fff1a23-de9e-48dc-a2c5-3b62a0869fb9%40googlegroups.com
E.g., also email notifications:
- Assignment creation or "opening" date.
- Due date reminder (24 hours, 48 hours, configurable).
- Assignment returned.
The second one is time-dependent and might share code with #109. The above could all be checkbox options in a course settings.
There is a serious subtle issue that we have to address soon. Namely, if a spammer creates a course, they can then send spam to all "students" (=victims) in the course as us. Inevitably this will happen. When it does, we'll deal with it. For now, doing what you describe here doesn't actually make things any worse, because a user can send other non-users arbitrary emails by inviting them to a course in the first place (which is already scary).
In the long run what we need here is a way for a user to send a direct message to another user... or for a user to make a message associated with a project available. Then users that have an email on file would get sent an email notification (configurable -- they can turn it off) telling them that this message is available (and maybe including the message). Anyway, the point is that this facility for courses should be a special case of something a bit more general involving messaging.
How about make it a members-only feature? It would discourage spammers and encourage membership.
one way to deal with spammers is to classify all outgoing emails, flag and hold them back (internally) and then we review them. sendgrid has a feature to measure the spam-level, but no idea how to use that. also, the actual overhead is a management interface to deal with those messages which got flagged.
enabling this only for paying members is of course a good spam protection.
Regarding the point that you can send someone an arbitrary email by inviting them to a course (or to be a collaborator on a project): this seems like it should also be true with other packages like Dropbox or Google Docs, and yet I have never gotten a spam invite from either. I would be very surprised if these were being screened manually.
As an opposite example, I got spam invites for google calendar events. They stopped after me and many complained about it. So yes, this happens, and all those larger services have good mechanisms in place to handle this. We can start using a spam filter for outgoing messages, but implementing and managing that is not an easy task. Sendgrid offers some kind of outgoing spam mail detections, but I don't know if that would be useful for our purposes, nor do I know how good it really is.
Still, we definitely have to solve this, and we need a good plan how to do this.
Yeah, any LMS has this capability, and not having it is a definite issue for practical usage. Difference is that the Registrar (or whoever) signs up students, not you, so maybe spamming isn't as bad of an issue then.
So, an easy way to do this without breaking the current security model is let the instructor email everyone that they added by email. We already list the emails for which this is true and the links are mail:to's. It makes sense for there to be a mail all button.
So, an easy way to do this without breaking the current security model is let the instructor email everyone that they added by email.
+1 do this. Also, add a feature to allow instructors to set the email address for a student. We already have a field for this in the .course file, so that shouldn't be hard.
I was thinking about exactly this (and wondering how it might be a security hazard) when I had to alert the students to a mistake I'd made, and I had to descend down into our campus IT infrastructure, rather than the friendly confines of SMC. +1, and thanks for working on this.
Rob
Work so far
Default when there's no search.
Number omitted has been moved to below the search bar.
Now the question is, should the button email all students displayed or always all students? I'm leaning towards all students displayed since it's easy enough to clear the search and maybe search has some sophisticated filtering abilities in the future.
I don't want to allow both options because that's option clutter in my opinion.
I could easily see myself accidentally emailing only a subset of my class when I meant to email the whole class, because I forgot to remove the filter. But that could be remedied by suitable labeling on whatever screen you reach by hitting the button.
Can you make it “Email All Students...” with ..., since it will surely open up another dialog.
once that's in, someone please remind me to look closely on the monthly quota for our emailing service :mag_right:
What happened with the code that generated the screenshots? It seems that emailing to students added by an email was agreed upon.
What happened with the code that generated the screenshots?
Who knows -- John hasn't worked on cocalc for many years, so it's gone. It'll have to be written starting from scratch. Also, in 2017 the code was I think in a different language (coffeescript).