One on one chat restrictions in Talk

Hello,

following scenario: we have a school that wants to use Talk as their internal messaging system, but they require to prohibit students from chatting to each other, only in group chats, where teacher is a member of group chat, students are allowed to chat. Also students should be allowed to one on one chat with any teacher.
The part with group chats, is already covered by “Limit creating a public and group conversation” feature in Talk settings, but for the rest of it, I could not find any solution.
Is there any way to achieve this behavior in Talk Chat ? If not, is there any point to make a feature reuquest out of it, or is it too specialized to be interesting for general public ?

Some relevant info:

  • Nextcloud Version: 24.0.2 (Self-Hosted)
  • All users are from an LDAP backend
  • We also have 2 LDAP groups, one contains all teachers and the other one all students

Thanks in advance

Hey @AleksDE

I guess the following feature request describes what you try to archive?!

2 Likes

Yes, it comes really close to what I need :slight_smile: Thanks for the link.

@AleksDE
I understand why you need this feature. But if you allow internet in school, students can use other chat programs like https://meet.jit.si (Jitsi) or https://senfcall.de (BigBlueButton) right away. They only need to send a link to each other or need to communicate the room name. Also they maybe use software like https://discord.com. Do you forbid the rest of the internet?

1 Like

@devnull its all about legal responsibility, if I as a school serves service like Talk, then it is responsible for everything that happens there, for example mobbing. If it happens on third party services like Discord its not schools problem.
Ofcourse every student has its own account and you allways know whos fault it is, but dealing with the consequences takes a lot of teachers and school staffs time.

Yes that is a problem.

I would like to know if it is possible to restrict the communication in Microsoft Teams, too. But there, the lack of this restriction would not be a bug, but a feature. :wink: Then the parents can report the mobbing to Microsoft. Microsoft is certainly very interested in it. :wink:

Really? The students uses the school infrastructure e.g. computer, tablets and the internet. I think if crimes were committed over the Internet, they would also be traced back to the school. The Internet is not a lawless space.

@devnull Precisely the lack of policies like this, is the reason a lot of folks go with Nextcloud or other solutions that are more talored to education space or at least allow modifications, in case of teams, even if I want and got the skill to do so, I cant modify it to my needs.
And using school infrastructure like computer, tablet or internet will not fallback on teachers or administrative staff to deal with it, it will be forwardet do IT department, which in case of most schools here, is external company that offers IT services for schools and they will deliver information that is needed by authorities. But if this happens on a platform hosted by the school, teachers and administrative staff will be involved in a lot of meetings dealing with parents questions like: why do you allow students to chat to each other without supervision on your platform and so on, not all is logical here. At the end of the day, school will probably not face any consequences, but it will consume a lot of teachers and administrative staffs time, which could be invested in something more meaningful rather answering stupid questions.
There are commercial chat products that offer said configuration, exactly because of the reasons I presented above.
Its not my wish, alot of our customers (schools) want configuration like this and it is the reason why Im asking.

I agree with you 100%.

But I think the real bullying takes place via the students’ completely unsupervised smartphones. Also, I think that many parents, unlike the students, do not know the incognito mode of the browsers. :wink:

Hi @AleksDE, please read Disable one-to-one conversations · Issue #7483 · nextcloud/spreed · GitHub. Thank you!

@szaimen already did and commented, that one comment is mine :slight_smile:

1 Like

@devnull yes, but like you said does Microsoft, Facebook and what not care about bullying ? Probably not, but a school cant say: we dont care, not our problem, you will need to attend meetings with parents, you will need to comfort them etc. its just time that gets wasted and if there is possibility to avoid it, it will be more than welcome, schools are even paying money to have that functionality.

Yes they pay money for it. A lot of the schools uses Microsoft Office 365. :wink:

Sorry german, but i think you are german, too.
Rheinland-Pfalz: Schulen dürfen Microsoft-Software Teams nicht mehr nutzen | heise online