This article outlines how to customize roles in your course to prevent certain users from receiving the email messages normally sent by the Announcements forum or block. The use case would be if you have any administrative users who require access to content in live courses but would have no need to see any messages about current course happenings, deadlines, etc.

To prevent such users from receiving the course messages, you need to take note of their role in the course as you can only customize notification permissions for specific roles within a course, not for individual users. In the example below we will customize the Non-Editing Instructor role, working with the scenario that we have used that role to enroll a group of users who will be undertaking a review of the course content.

To block course messages:

1. From your course main page, click on the Participants tab at the top. Then click on the dropdown menu that says Enrolled Users.
   
   
   
   
2. From the dropdown list click on Permissions.
   
   
   
   
3. The permissions page initially contains all the permissions for all the roles. To limit this, adjust the dropdown box underneath 'Advanced role override' to whichever role you want to prevent from receiving messages - in our example, we will choose 'Non-Editing Instructor'.
   
   
   
   
4. The page will now refresh with all the available capabilities and permissions for only this role, with cleaner options for changing them. As there are a large number of capabilities in the system, you will need to filter the list to get the one you want: 'Allow force subscribe' for the Forum activity. You can then switch the permissions from 'Inherit (Allow)' to 'Prevent'.
   
   
   
   
5. Click Save Changes.
   
   
6. Now any users enrolled in your course in the 'Non-editing Instructor' role will not receive messages sent from the Announcements forum. You should no longer see their names in the list of subscribers for the forum.