Group Community TA is added even though there are no divided discussions configured

[mariajgrimaldi]

Expected behavior

When adding a community TA to a course without cohorts and divided discussions enabled through the membership tab in the instructor dashboard, the Instructor should see an error, and the user shouldn't be assigned with role community TA.

Actual behavior

The error is displayed as expected, however:

1. User isn't shown in the community TA section in Membership, but it's seen in the discussions that user has Community TA status.

2. The user is added as Community TA to discussions

3. It isn't possible to revoke access until the divided discussions functionality is enabled for a course.

Steps to reproduce

• Setup discussions in the course without enabling Divide discussions by cohorts option
• Try to add user as Community TA on the Membership tab in the Instructor dashboard
• Check discussions post by the assigned user

Additional information

After the Cohorts are enabled for the course and Divide discussions by cohorts option is enabled in discussions, the user appears in the list of Community TA

This issue was reported as part of the redwood testing process: openedx/wg-build-test-release#373

[mariajgrimaldi]

This also happens in quince. So, the main question is whether this is the correct behavior.

cc @jmakowski1123 @crathbun428

[marcotuts]

We have no constraints to my knowledge on which roles are usable for discussions based on enabled features. We could I suppose let you know that you can't set Group Community TAs since the discussions aren't cohorted, but there are weird situations depending on what you enable / disable first. This is probably a bug / gap that I would have marked as a closed won't do in the past based, with the expectation that this would be solved by a larger improvement / re-write of discussion role configuration.

We could improve this for sure, however I don't think we need to listen to the "I would have marked this bug as won't do" mindset. :)

While it may be best to fully remove all of these role configuration views from the instructor dashboard for Discussions roles and move those into the discussions app so it can do this feature / configuration checking / messaging etc, I don't know that anyone is actually working on discussions improvements presently.