5.3, 5.4 Compulsory Topic

Quite frequently, it is necessary in a community to inform members about important news or changes. In WoltLab Suite, this is usually done by means of threads or posts, articles or possibly blog entries. It is common to all of you, however, that your members do not have to read the information, nor in any way have to confirm the reading or even approve to it. With Compulsory Topic you can easily change that.

Compulsory Reading

This plugin for WoltLab Suite gives you the opportunity to create and publish information for the members, which they have to read. As long as your members have not read and have not accepted such a topic, they can not use the community any longer. They are constantly redirected to the page with the compulsory topic on any page call.

In contrast to similar plugins (for example for WBB 3), the forum is not used for the compulsory topics, but an additional page is created in the WoltLab Suite, on which each member's individual topics are presented. Applications like forum or blog do not have to be installed.

Features

Compulsory Topic provides the following essential features:

• an arbitrary number of compulsory topics can be created which are displayed to the members one by one in the corresponding chronological order,
• compulsory topics can be automatically applied to newly registered members,
• a variety of WoltLab Suite-typical conditions allows the compilation of compulsory topics for selected members,
• members may aprove to topics or refuse them; both is statistically recorded,
• depending on approval or refusal, user actions, like disabling, banning or user group assignments, can be executed,
• compulsory topics can be activated and deactivated automatically in a timed manner,
• pages can be defined as exceptions, which are displayed despite the topic; e.g. the imprint or the privacy policy.

Notice:

It is not possible to add users to or remove users from the admin / owner user group.

Expandability

With optional and free packages for the WoltLab applications additional conditions for the compulsory topics can be added; e.g. the number of posts or pictures.

Configurability

In addition to the user group permissions, the above-mentioned exception pages can be set as basic configuration in the ACP as well as the page to which users are to be forwarded after reading. The plugin can be deactivated via a module if necessary.

The compulsory topics themselves are created and edited in the ACP under User. Topics can, if required, be easily copied.

Collaboration

If comparable plugins are installed, which also automatically redirect to pages, it can happen that pages are no longer callable because the plugins are arguing to display the correct page. Just configure page exceptions to enable the display of pages of such plugins.

Notes on Data Protection

• This extension stores the user name and user ID of the creator in the database when creating a compulsory topic in the ACP (table wcf1_compulsory). When confirming / rejecting a topic in the frontend, the user names and user IDs of the relevant users are stored in the database (table wcf1_compulsory_dismissed). Deleting a compulsory topic will delete that data.
• If a user who has confirmed / rejected a mandatory topic is deleted, the user name remains in the database (table wcf1_compulsory_dismissed).
• Uninstalling the extension will erase all stored data.