I do use Moodle in a production environment, but I don’t blindly “trust” this software is being delivered in a locked down, safe, secure condition…I’ve found too many serious flaws in both the code and design in the past to have that kind of blind trust in Moodle. So, I do know from experience that it can be effectively used in a production environment, but you’ve got to stay on your toes and you can’t put blind trust in the devs…you’d better continually look for holes like this to protect yourself and your organization. If you want to trust that someone else is looking out for you, then you had better run, not walk, away from Moodle…and most other open source apps.

I’m sure a lot of people think something like this couldn’t happen again, but I’m sure a lot of people thought the same thing after I exposed the moodle_data problem (being exposed to the world) and the profile porn spam problem (still impacting hundreds of thousands of sites)…just to name two recent issues.

Undoubtedly, there are literally millions of course backup files out there containing all this private user data and what has Moodle done to inform people of this? They’ve patched their code…they’re done.

The fact is, Moodle hasn’t changed significantly in 9 years–same ole forums, chat, wiki, interface, etc. But then again, neither has any LMS. All the changes to Moodle in the past few years have been nothing more than window dressing…adding blogs (with less actual functionality that blogs had 10 years ago), adding “user roles” which resulted in more end-user problems than devs will ever be capable of understanding, adding a “database activity” which virtually no normal user knows how to use or why they would want to use it, etc. So, even though Moodle has remained pretty much static (from an end users perspective) for the past 10 years these major security problems still existed either “un-noticed” by devs or considered “features”.

Now, fast forward to next year and the Moodle 2.0 is scheduled to be rolled out…its been in development for 2 years now…and there are some major changes taking place for the first time since Moodle was born. Talk about potential for security/privacy problems…when I look at the 2.0 Road Map, and consider past performance with years of relatively unchanged code, I see massive red security/privacy flags and potholes all over that road. Anyone who upgrades a production site to 2.0 sooner than 2-years after it’s declared “stable”, will be, in my opinion, taking a huge risk.

This should serve as a dire warning to anyone who thinks they can use this software in a real, production environment. I would imagine Blackboard is having a field day with this. As they should.

Again, you won’t have any of this in your config.php file unless your Moodle is only a few days old. No, you don’t need to add the “includeuserpasswordsinbackup” line to your config.php file. This is just an “assumption” on my part, but I assume when you upgrade now, by default, user passwords will not be included in course backups and you would need to un-comment this line in the config.php file if you wanted to include them.

But again, understand, I am NOT in the moodle dev loop (or any moodle loop for that matter), so post to their forums for “official” advice and good luck.

CFG->includeuserpasswordsinbackup = True

I don’t have that in my config.php file, so should I add it?

Thank you for this video. I’m looking forward to your reply.