[Koha-devel] Suspensions and the Fines system

[José Parrella]

Greetings,

I'm wondering if Koha has a way to suspend users when they fail to
return their books instead of charging them with money. In Venezuela
(and at least in other Latinamerican country, as I saw in the mailing
list archives) users are not fined, but instead are barred of using the
library for usually three days.

I've implemented a sloppy solution which I'm studying right now. In
C4::Circulation::Fines.pm, under the UpdateFine function, I added a
statement which sets the debarred value in the borrowers table to "1",
effectively impeding the user to request books. This is supposed to
happen when the user is starting to get fined by Koha.

OTOH, in the fines2.pl script, I took profit of the $difference variable
which is used to re-calculate the fines daily. When that $difference
variable reaches 3 (days), the debarred flag gets set to "0" again.
Then, the librarian clicks "Pay fine" and just "as if", the user's back
again.

Of course this lacks some stuff, for example, having a sane way to
specify the number of days of suspension (via the Parameters system) and
 also it assumes that the user has returned the item in that 3-day slot.
I would like to know if somebody has any experience regarding this, and
maybe some ideas about a proper development for this feature.

Yours,
Jose

-- 
José M. Parrella -> Debian Sid, k2.6.17.13
Escuela de Ingenieria Electrica
Universidad Central de Venezuela -> ucvlug.info