Turning off message block en mass......

Last week, we had a rogue student sending message in their course.  Oh my!  My customer said something like this to me.

"james, did so and so send these messages?  The teacher does not want the students messaging in the course."  Hmmmmm, wellllll.  The teacher could use the message block to say "Stop that messaging".

Funny right?

I did use the native message reporting to verify what my customer reported.

Site admin |  Reports | Messaging - then choose the student to view their messaging in the moodle

I did look up the permissions around messaging, anticipating the next request would be "can we turn off the messaging for students?".  The messaging can be turned off for the moodle - everyone, but not for a specific role.  Well, at least not without creating a new role and changing the permissions, but that gets too dirty too fast.  Dirty = a change to the default functionality, a maintenance point created in your moodle.  No thanks.

Today, my customer said this
"

Can we remove the Message block in all of our Moodle courses? 

We would like to direct all students to use Genius for messaging.  I have informed the teachers that we will doing this.

Is there a quick way to do it globally? 

"
Looking in the DB, I found the mdl_block_instances table.  After a little experimenting with a course and the DB, I was confident that I could remove the other messaging recs from the DB.

These are my testing steps with the course and the db....

• turning the block off in the course, 
• inspecting the table
• turning the block back on 
• inspecting the table again.....
• delete the record in the table and verify in the course

This is my SQL to isolate the recs

EDIT dbname`.`mdl_block_instances`

WHERE blockname LIKE '%message%' AND pagetypepattern LIKE '%course-view%';

I then highlighted the records, right clicked and deleted.

Moral of the story?
Most things that are requested en mass like this, can be accomplished with a little work, in the DB.