[Melbourne-pm] looking for script to save weeks of slogwork

Daniel Pittman daniel at rimspace.net
Sun Dec 5 20:27:27 PST 2010


On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 15:21, john thornton <jdthornton at ozemail.com.au> wrote:

> I don't know if this is done in python,perl or what the blazes. Let me
> explain.
>
> I am a student at a college. It has a forum whose adminstator has agreed to
> my request, as a student, to give PM privileges to all students. Now, since
> all students get automatic status on the forum, virtue of their student
> number, the admin has told me this:
>
>
> I have been following up on the Private Messaging permissions for all
> students as I think it is a valuable function for students to use. It looks
> as though we will have to manually give individual students permission to
> send PMs to each other. With thousands of students registered as users on
> the forums, this is not a small task. We will start with the top 200 or so
> users who frequently use the forums and go on from there.
>
> Now, instead of this slogwork is there any script that could do it quickly?
> A python script? php?perl? I don't know what the technology behind the forum
> is. I could ask if that will help people here advise me. But for now I am
> trying to keep my question uncluttered and simple.  It does seem to me to be
> a task that a lot of forums would be faced with.

This should actually be absolutely trivial: the forum will use something to
store the user details in, probably an SQL database.

When you grant the private message feature to a student it will alter
something in that database to record that fact; if you identify what that is
and all you can then direct change that setting in the database using whatever
SQL administrative tools you have available.

That should sort you out in short order; I would guess that it would be one,
maybe two, SQL statements tops.  Even without that, though, knowing where the
data was stored and what the forum software was would be a big help.

Regards,
        Daniel
-- 
  Daniel Pittman � � � � � �  daniel at rimspace.net � � � � � �  +61 401 155 707
� � � � � � �   made with 100 percent post-consumer electrons


More information about the Melbourne-pm mailing list