Hiding Conversations tab from certain IP ranges

[sbickley]

Is anyone aware of a way you can hide the Conversations/Messages tab in Canvas from certain IP addresses? We manage a large testing center and would like to prevent students from using the messages feature while in our facility. Of course, we look for this behavior, but it's more difficult to catch since it's built into Canvas.

It seems like the CSS could be customized to hide the Conversations tab element, but how to do this reliably based on location of the tester seems more difficult to pull off. Still, it seems worth asking in case anyone has bumped into similar circumstances.

It would be nice to have a feature for this in Canvas--perhaps on the Test side--where instructors could mark "Restrict communication features during exam" to hide this page for us.

[jerry_nguyen]

@sbickley 

You can upload a custom Javascript to get IP address of a student and then inject CSS to hide the element. 

However, custom CSS and Javascript uploaded to Canvas can always be disabled by students.

[sbickley]

Thank you, Jerry. Do you or anyone know what the Javascript code specifically would be to accomplish this?

[jerry_nguyen]

@sbickley 

You can try this script

1st it will look up a user's IP by calling ipify API, then check whenever the IP falls within a defined range

    function getIPAddress() {
      fetch('https://api64.ipify.org?format=json')
        .then(response => response.json())
        .then(data => {
          const ipAddress = data.ip;
          const ipParts = ipAddress.split('.');
          const ipNumeric = ipParts.map(Number).reduce((acc, val) => acc * 256 + val);
          // Define the IP range
          const ipRangeStart = '1.1.1.0';
          const ipRangeEnd = '1.1.2.0';
          const ipRangeStartNumeric = ipRangeStart.split('.').map(Number).reduce((acc, val) => acc * 256 + val);
          const ipRangeEndNumeric = ipRangeEnd.split('.').map(Number).reduce((acc, val) => acc * 256 + val);

          // Check if the IP address is within the specified range
          if (ipNumeric >= ipRangeStartNumeric && ipNumeric <= ipRangeEndNumeric) {
			//jQuery to remove Inbox link
            $("#global_nav_conversations_link").remove(); 
          }
        })
        .catch(error => console.error(error));
    }

    getIPAddress();