README

Adds the things Moodle's messaging lacks to the message drawer and the messages page, without changing core:

Attachments. Attach files with the paper-clip button, by dragging and dropping anywhere on the conversation, or by pasting an image. Uploads start at once, show progress, and report size and type limits clearly. Attached images are shown as wide as the panel allows (never larger than their real size); clicking one opens a full-size viewer.
Rich text. Write a formatted message, with attachments and embedded images, in the full editor. What you had typed in the drawer is carried over.
Mentions. Type @ in a group conversation to pick a member (keyboard or mouse). The mentioned person gets their own notification type ("You are mentioned in a group conversation"), so they can mute a busy group and still hear when they are mentioned.
Reactions on any message, with who reacted on hover and to screen readers.
Edit and delete your own messages within a configurable window. Edited messages show "Edited" with the time, and anyone in the conversation can see earlier versions. "Delete for everyone" uses Moodle's own delete-for-all.
Pinned messages in a collapsible strip at the top of the conversation.
Link previews (off by default; see Security).
Seen by: who has read the latest message in a group conversation. Each person can switch it off in the messaging settings panel; then they neither show nor see it.
Scheduled send: write now, send later. Pending messages appear in the strip at the top of the conversation, where they can be changed or cancelled.
Message search across all your conversations, group conversations included.
Resizable drawer: drag the handle on the drawer's edge (or focus it and use the arrow keys) to make the drawer wider; double-click to reset.

Email: sent once, a little later

For one-to-one conversations the message email is held back for a short delay (two minutes by default) and then sent once, with the text as it stands at that moment, so a typo fixed quickly never reaches the inbox. Later edits never send another email. The email is skipped if the recipient has already read the message in Moodle (configurable), has muted the conversation, or the message was deleted. Group conversations keep Moodle's own daily email digest, which also sends the text as it stands.

How: Moodle has no supported way to delay one email, so the plugin uses the pre_processor_message_send callback to give the email processor, and only the email processor, a copy of the recipient that it skips; a background task then sends the email. If anything about that fails, Moodle sends the email immediately as usual (still exactly once). The PHPUnit suite fails if a future Moodle release stops honouring this.

Requirements

Moodle 4.5, 5.1, 5.2 or 5.3 (tested on 4.5.13+, 5.1.6+, 5.2.2+ and 5.3rc1), with the PHP version that Moodle release requires (8.1 or later for 4.5). Moodle 5.0 falls inside the supported range but is not tested.
Messaging enabled on the site. The emoji picker, if wanted, is core's (allowemojipicker).

Installation

Copy the plugin to local/messagingsupercharger (under public/ on Moodle 5.1 and later) and visit Site administration > Notifications.

Settings

Site administration > Plugins > Local plugins > Messaging Supercharger:

Turn each feature on or off.
Maximum attachment size (never above the site limit), maximum number of attachments, allowed file types.
Edit window (default 15 minutes; 0 = no limit), email delay (default 2 minutes; 0 = let Moodle send immediately), and whether to skip the email if the message was read.
Attachment storage per user (default 100 MB; unlimited is allowed) and how long attachments are kept (default: as long as the message).
Link previews: an optional list of allowed domains.
How often an open conversation refreshes reactions, edits, pins and "seen by".

Capabilities

All are checked in the conversation's context: the course for a course-group conversation, the system otherwise, so they can be overridden per course.

Capability	Default
`local/messagingsupercharger:sendattachments`	Authenticated user
`local/messagingsupercharger:userichtext`	Authenticated user
`local/messagingsupercharger:mention`	Authenticated user
`local/messagingsupercharger:react`	Authenticated user
`local/messagingsupercharger:editownmessage`	Authenticated user
`local/messagingsupercharger:deleteownmessageforall`	Authenticated user
`local/messagingsupercharger:pinmessage`	Teacher, non-editing teacher, manager
`local/messagingsupercharger:schedulesend`	Authenticated user

Pinning: in a one-to-one conversation either person may pin; in a group conversation only people with pinmessage in the course may, because a pin is shown to the whole group.

userichtext controls the rich text editor. It is not a content filter: Moodle's own messaging web services also accept formatted text, and every message is cleaned by Moodle's HTML cleaning when it is shown, whichever way it was written.

All of Moodle's own messaging rules still apply: blocking, "contacts only" privacy, messaging disabled, conversation membership and disabled group conversations. Scheduled messages are checked again when they are sent.

Security and privacy

Attachments are stored by the plugin in the system context and served only to members of the conversation the message belongs to (and to the uploader). Anything that is not an image is always sent as a download.
Every upload is checked on the server, whatever the browser did: allowed type and size, number of files, Moodle's own limit on how fast drafts may be created, and the person's storage quota. Then its contents are checked: programs, installers and scripts are refused whatever they are called, and images, PDFs and plain text must really be what their extension says (an .exe renamed .pdf is refused). Other types, such as office documents and archives, cannot be told apart reliably by content, so for those the protection is the site's antivirus.
Uploads are scanned by the site's antivirus plugins through Moodle's own antivirus manager (Site administration > Plugins > Antivirus plugins), exactly as Moodle scans other uploads, with the same logging, notifications and quarantine. The plugin has no scanner of its own; with no antivirus plugin enabled, nothing is scanned.
Files are checked again when the message is sent, so a file placed in the draft area some other way is refused too.
Retention: when "Keep attachments for" is set, an hourly task deletes the attachments and embedded images of older messages. The message itself stays, with its text, and says that its attachments have expired.
Message text is cleaned by Moodle's own formatting, as for any message.
Link previews make the server fetch pages that users link to, so they are off by default. When on, previews are fetched once, when a message is sent (never when someone reads it), only over http(s) on ports 80/443, only from public addresses (private, loopback, link-local and similar ranges are refused after DNS resolution, and the connection is pinned to the checked address), with redirects re-checked, a 5 second timeout and a 512 KB size cap. Moodle's blocked-hosts setting also applies, and an allowlist can restrict previews to chosen sites. Preview images are downloaded by the server, so readers' browsers never contact the linked site. A proxy is never used, so on sites that need one there are no previews.
The Privacy API provider covers every table and the file area (export and delete, per user and per context). Deleting a person's data deletes the files they attached, also in group conversations whose messages Moodle keeps in the course; those messages then list the attachments without the files. Pins they made are kept for the conversation without their name.
Link previews are kept once fetched (one per address), because they are only ever fetched when a message is sent. Preview images are shown only to people who can see a message containing the link.

The Moodle app and other clients

Attachments, mentions and formatting are part of the message's text, so they appear in the Moodle app and in email. Reactions, pins, "seen by", the "edited" marker and edits made after a message was loaded appear in the web interface only. Messages written in the app are ordinary messages; their email is still held and sent once.

Maintenance after a Moodle upgrade

Everything the plugin assumes about Moodle's messaging page is in two places: amd/src/selectors.js (the DOM) and amd/src/send_interceptor.js (the send web service names). Check those two files against the core_message templates and JavaScript. Moodle 5.1 and later put the open conversation on the conversation footer; on 4.5 the plugin follows the message drawer's route changes instead (amd/src/controller.js). The styles work with Bootstrap 4 (Moodle 4.5) and 5: Bootstrap 5 variables have fallbacks, and the plugin uses its own classes where the two differ.

Licence

GNU GPL v3 or later.

adamjenkins / moodle-local_messagingsupercharger

Package info

Security

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