CUNY Graduate Center - Project Tracking System: Issueshttps://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/https://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/favicon.ico2023-09-14T23:27:45ZCUNY Graduate Center - Project Tracking System
Redmine CUNY Academic Commons - Feature #18841 (New): Downtime planninghttps://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/issues/188412023-09-14T23:27:45ZColin McDonald
<p>In light of recent issues with our server, we'd like to have a more concrete plan in place should the Commons experience significant downtime. Let's gather ideas, next steps, and preparatory materials here.</p>
<p>As a starting point, during the last few meetings we discussed establishing a Commons archive or backup. We need to hash out what that would mean:</p>
<p>- What content would we save and what wouldn't we?<br />- Would we save full site/group configurations (members, preferences, etc) prioritize Library and Media uploads, etc?<br />- Where would this archive live, and how would it be updated/tested/maintained?<br />- What would be the plan for using this in the event of an outage?<br />- Could we maintain an external list of site/group admin emails for emergency outreach?</p> CUNY Academic Commons - Design/UX #17677 (New): Cataloguing notification typeshttps://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/issues/176772023-02-16T18:54:32ZBoone Gorgesboone@gorg.es
<p>Following up on a recent dev call, here's a list of unique notification types on the Commons:</p>
<pre>
| added_reader |
| bbp_new_reply |
| comment_mention |
| followedpaper_comment |
| followedpaper_edit |
| friendship_accepted |
| friendship_request |
| group_invite |
| membership_request_accepted |
| membership_request_rejected |
| member_promoted_to_admin |
| member_promoted_to_mod |
| mypaper_comment |
| new_at_mention |
| new_membership_request |
| new_message |
| new_wire_post |
| pending_booking |
</pre>
<p>We can eliminate several that are related to Social Paper: <code>added_reader</code>, <code>comment_mention</code>, <code>followedpaper_comment</code>, <code>followedpaper_edit</code>, <code>mypaper_comment</code>. In addition, <code>new_wire_post</code> is linked to a feature that we no longer have on the Commons. This leaves us with:</p>
<p>1. bbp_new_reply - Created by bbPress for user A when user B posts a reply to a forum topic or reply written by A. <br />2. friendship_accepted - Created by BP for user A when user B accepts a friendship request that A sent to B.<br />3. friendship_request - Created by BP for user A when user B sends a friendship request to A.<br />4. group_invite - Created by BP for user A when user B invites A to join a group.<br />5. membership_request_accepted - Created by BP for user A when A requests membership in a group, and the group's admin approves the request<br />6. membership_request_rejected - Created by BP for user A when A requests membership in a group, and the group's admin rejects the request<br />7. member_promoted_to_admin - Created by BP for user A when A is promoted in a group from 'member' to 'admin'<br />8. member_promoted_to_mod - Created by BP for user A when A is promoted in a group from 'member' to 'mod'<br />9. new_at_mention - Created by BP for user A when A is at-mentioned anywhere tracked by BuddyPress. Notably for our purpose, this includes blog posts, blog comments, forum posts.<br />10. new_membership_request - Created by BP for user A when A is the admin of a private group, and user B requests membership in that group<br />11. new_message - Created by BP for user A when A receives a private message<br />12. pending_booking - Created by the events-manager plugin for user A when user A has created an event with booking, and user B books for that event. events-manager is <strong>not</strong> a plugin that we run on the main site, so this must be something that happens on secondary sites</p>
<p>Of these, a number are purely informational. 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12 A right-hand notifications pane could have a message that summarizes the information ("So-and-so replied to your forum post") and then links to that content.</p>
<p>Several of them have obvious follow-up actions. 3, 4, 10, perhaps 11. A right-hand notifications pane could have a link that points you to the page where you'd perform the action, or perhaps it could show you the interface for actually performing the action (ie, accepting the friendship).</p>
<p>I hope this is a helpful start.</p> CUNY Academic Commons - Bug #16655 (New): Formatting on CETLS Events pagehttps://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/issues/166552022-08-24T17:47:40ZGina Cherry
<p>The formatting of my site's events page appears to have changed, even though I have not made any changes to it. Any idea what might have happened?</p>
<p><a class="external" href="https://cetls.bmcc.cuny.edu/events/">https://cetls.bmcc.cuny.edu/events/</a></p> CUNY Academic Commons - Publicity #16585 (Reporter Feedback): New annual report datahttps://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/issues/165852022-08-09T19:50:33ZColin McDonald
<p>We hope to release an annual report soon getting back on our academic-year annual schedule that was disrupted during Covid. This one should cover two years, 2020-2021 and 2021-2022. To that end, can I ask for:</p>
<p>- Total number of Sites and Groups that we had on June 1st of 2021 and also of 2022</p>
<p>- Similar to #16355 from last month, overall total and by-role total of Members that joined from 6/1/20 to 5/31/21 and 6/1/21 to 5/31/22 (and understood that users can have more than one role)</p>
<p>- Also building off of #16355, I'd like to track all Courses over time since we launched Courses. In that prior ticket you provided this:</p>
<pre><code>[totals] => Array<br /> (<br /> [Summer 2021] => 38<br /> [Fall 2021] => 271<br /> [Spring 2022] => 199<br /> [Summer 2022] => 24<br /> )</code></pre>
<p>Would it be possible to provide the same for each semester from Fall 2018 (when I believe Courses began) to Fall 2022? And if I added each semester up, would I get (at least roughly) to the total number of Courses right now? In #12673 I asked for month by month course creation, but I think that's probably too granular at this stage for the Courses era.</p>
<p>We also looked at Courses in #13402 and I could pull numbers from there but I'm wondering if it's best to do a fresh query across all semesters since it's been a while since we looked at this, then it'll be easier to update in subsequent years.</p>
<p>Many thanks!</p> CUNY Academic Commons - Design/UX #15210 (New): Google Analytics improvementshttps://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/issues/152102022-01-21T23:17:49ZColin McDonald
<p>Sara's asked how she can see how often users are clicking on links in the various parts of the public/private new homepage. I'm not sure our Google Analytics (GA) setup is configured for this currently, and I pretty quickly hit my own knowledge and implementation limits on it so wanted to throw it to the dev team here.</p>
<p>If I understand correctly, we need to use the new GA-4 (as opposed to Universal Analytics or UA, see <a class="issue tracker-3 status-5 priority-4 priority-default closed" title="Support: Google Analytics 4 tagging (Resolved)" href="https://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/issues/13511">#13511</a>) features to do this. I also believe we'll need to set up Events that recognize clicks in different areas of the page. I took a stab below at outlining the different sections. From here though, I'm a bit out of my depth. I think this is more of a challenge due to the dynamic nature of the link lists -- the URL of the link is actually less important, for these purposes, than if I clicked on it in My Sites or Activity From My Campus or wherever. It may matter that most of these links may not technically be "outbound" by GA's definition because they're still on the commons.gc.edu domain, but that's unclear to me too.</p>
<p>I'm not sure if we could tie different GA-4 events via CSS class to these sections or something similar, or if we need to append additional CSS or other code to structure this correctly. I also assume we'll be inserting more GA-4 code into the site, whether it makes sense to do that manually or via the Google Tag Manager service seemingly offered for things like this. GA-4 collects general events like all 'clicks' automatically, but nothing more granular without customization:</p>
<p><a class="external" href="https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9234069?hl=en&ref_topic=9756175">https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9234069?hl=en&ref_topic=9756175</a></p>
<p>I'm also not really sure of the best way to track clicks on the more universal parts of the site, like the header (nav) and footer. There used to be a Chrome extension that was half-decent at this, but Google stopped supporting/updating that in 2019.</p>
<p>I think I'll leave it here for now, in the hopes that Boone/Ray/Jeremy have some experience to bear here, or can at least pick up the more technical parts of this thread. Let me know what else I can do to help steer and describe this.</p>
<p>One last thing - Sara would also like to be able to see how often the People page filters are being used, and which aspects are the most popular. I believe we set up something like this in <a class="issue tracker-2 status-5 priority-4 priority-default closed" title="Feature: Track directory filter use in Google Analytics (Resolved)" href="https://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/issues/11760">#11760</a>, but I'm not sure if it's still functional or how to find it in our Analytics dashboard.</p>
<p>Distinct Sections to Track Clicks, public homepage:<br />- Register / Login / Learn More top blade<br />- Latest News<br />- Featured Sites<br />- Active Sites<br />- Featured Groups<br />- Active Groups<br />- Members</p>
<p>Distinct Sections to Track Clicks, private homepage:<br />- Under-avatar links<br />- My Sites<br />- My Groups<br />- Latest News<br />- Shortcuts (by URL might be helpful here)<br />- CUNY-Wide Activity<br />- Campus Activity<br />- Featured Groups<br />- Groups Across CUNY<br />- Campus Groups<br />- Featured Sites<br />- Sites Across CUNY<br />- Campus Sites<br />- Members Across CUNY<br />- Campus Members</p> CUNY Academic Commons - Support #14842 (Reporter Feedback): Question about widgets and block editorhttps://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/issues/148422021-10-06T14:27:02ZGina Cherry
<p>I make extensive use of the Widget Context plugin to control which widgets appear in different areas of my websites. As I understand it, this plugin does not work with the new widget block editor. How can I accomplish this type of control over widgets in the new environment?</p> CUNY Academic Commons - Feature #12911 (New): Block access to xmlrpc.php based on User-Agenthttps://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/issues/129112020-06-09T21:10:11ZBoone Gorgesboone@gorg.es
<p>Branching off of #12898.</p>
<p>On today's dev call, we decided we'd try blacklisting certain User-Agent strings in xmlrpc.php requests.</p>
<p>I downloaded the last 7 complete days of access logs and did some parsing to get a list of unique user agents. The attached CSV file has these agents, with the corresponding counts.</p> CUNY Academic Commons - Bug #12436 (Assigned): Nightly system downtimehttps://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/issues/124362020-02-18T16:21:55ZBoone Gorgesboone@gorg.es
<p>I'm opening this ticket to track recent outages on the Commons. A number of us receive automated notices when the database server is forced to reboot. Beginning roughly one month ago, we started getting these notices several times per week. These notifications indicate when the DB server is forced to reboot, so they indicate at best the end of a problematic period. I receive additional notifications when requests begin to take an inordinately long time, which serves as an indicator of when the incidents begin.</p>
<p>I've been keeping track of specifics over the last few weeks, and I've discerned the following patterns:</p>
<p>- The most common downtime is just after 05:00 UTC (midnight EST, UTC-5), with my incident reports rolling in sometimes around 12:03am and sometimes around 12:07am.<br />- Occasionally, the incidents have begun an hour or two earlier, shortly after 03:00 or 04:00 UTC.<br />- Incidents seem always to begin several minutes after the hour<br />- Reboots usually take place between 3 and 6 minutes after the beginning of the incident<br />- On some occasions, the reboots don't seem to fix the underlying issue, and another cycle of slow requests + db reboots immediately follows.<br />- Sometimes this'll happen a few nights in a row, while sometimes the site will go a few days without any notifications.</p>
<p>All of this strongly suggests that the problem is with an automated cron task, specifically one that takes place around midnight. I've begun to do an analysis of the tasks scheduled for around this time, cross-referencing with the logs. Ideally, we'd be able to narrow down the culprit by identifying the last cron task that begins just before the outages. This is not possible, for a couple reasons: First, the performance issues may only kick in a minute or two after the task begins running (as the system's resources are gradually used up). Second, the Cavalcade logs don't natively keep track of when a task begins running, but only when it finishes (see <a class="external" href="https://github.com/humanmade/Cavalcade-Runner/blob/master/inc/class-runner.php#L377">https://github.com/humanmade/Cavalcade-Runner/blob/master/inc/class-runner.php#L377</a>).</p>
<p>So the best we can do is to make some educated guesses. I'll follow up in a comment with initial thoughts.</p> CUNY Academic Commons - Support #12004 (Reporter Feedback): Notifications for spam blog commentshttps://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/issues/120042019-10-22T18:30:17ZGina Cherry
<p>You recently added functionality to the Commons so that the site administrator receives an email notification when a comment goes to spam. This worked for awhile, but today I noticed two comments in spam for which I was not notified.</p> CUNY Academic Commons - Support #11883 (New): Need Embedding Help Page Update (Tableau)https://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/issues/118832019-09-19T21:43:37ZAnthony Wheeler
<p>Hi Scott,</p>
<p>So I was recently trying to embed a Tableau visualization into a Commons site when I ran into a couple of roadblocks. I went to our Help Page for embedding from other websites, and it was helpful, but something we may want to add is that when copying the share link over from Tableau, you have to make sure you copy the link under "Original View" <br /><img src="https://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/attachments/download/12443/Screen%20Shot%202019-09-19%20at%205.40.11%20PM.png" alt="" /></p>
<p>It was only after that discovery that the visualization was fully functioning within the Commons. I attached (or tried to attach) a screenshot to hopefully show you what I'm talking about.</p>
<p>Thanks!</p> CUNY Academic Commons - Feature #11517 (Assigned): wp-accessibility plugin should not strip 'targ...https://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/issues/115172019-06-04T15:08:25ZBoone Gorgesboone@gorg.es
<p>The default setting of wp-accessibility is to strip 'target="_blank"' from links. See <a class="issue tracker-1 status-8 priority-4 priority-default closed" title="Bug: Links not opening in new tab (Duplicate)" href="https://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/issues/11512">#11512</a>, <a class="issue tracker-3 status-5 priority-4 priority-default closed" title="Support: open link in a new tab not working (Resolved)" href="https://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/issues/11002">#11002</a>.</p>
<p>In <a class="issue tracker-1 status-8 priority-4 priority-default closed" title="Bug: Links not opening in new tab (Duplicate)" href="https://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/issues/11512">#11512</a>, Gina suggests that this should not be the default behavior:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Since the plugin appears to insert such a warning in the HTML, would it be possible to configure it so that it does not default to removing the target attribute from links? Removing the target attribute is likely to be confusing for other users of the Teaching template.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I personally am not a fan of target="_blank". See <a class="external" href="https://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/issues/10712#note-2">https://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/issues/10712#note-2</a> and follow-up conversation. Moreover, I'm not a huge fan of messing with the default settings of third-party plugins, because it complicates updates and puts us out of step with their documentation, etc. But if others feel strongly that the current behavior is potentially confusing, it's probably possible to change the default behavior, either globally or in the case of the Teaching Template only.</p>
<p>I'm assigning this to Laurie as she's been the point person for building these templates, but general feedback is welcome.</p> CUNY Academic Commons - Bug #10794 (New): Memcached connection occasionally breakshttps://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/issues/107942018-12-06T20:30:55ZBoone Gorgesboone@gorg.es
<p>A handful of times over the past month or so, the Memcached connection seems to have failed completely. This manifests first by extreme slowness in Commons load times. With Query Monitor enabled, I can then see that there are hundreds of database hits instead of the normal small handful. Occasionally, `wp cache flush` fixes it. But more often, I have to go in and switch from one to the other item in the $memcached_servers array. When I do this (and, importantly, run `wp cache flush` immediately afterward, to ensure that WP doesn't access stale cache in the other node) things come back to life immediately.</p>
<p>I don't really have the tools at my disposal to debug this fully. If the problem is that the cache is corrupted and thus inaccessible, I guess I would know that by looking at some sort of Memcached log <a class="external" href="https://serverfault.com/questions/422350/memcached-debuging-server-logs-monitor-the-memcached-servers">https://serverfault.com/questions/422350/memcached-debuging-server-logs-monitor-the-memcached-servers</a> and perhaps by examining the contents of the cache directly via Telnet. Or the problem could be a connection issue, though I'm unsure how to test that directly.</p>
<p>I don't know the proper next steps, but I'm starting this ticket so that the issue is on Ray's radar and so that we have a place to collect ideas and incident reports.</p> CUNY Academic Commons - Support #9729 (New): 503 Errors showing on newlaborforum.cuny.eduhttps://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/issues/97292018-05-08T12:46:01ZDiane Krauthamer
<p>Hi there - newlaborforum.cuny.edu is generating a lot of 503 errors, causing issues with the crawl. I seemed to temporarily resolve this issue by deactivating the Jetpack plugin, but now it appears to be a server issue perhaps. I have attached a screenshot of how these errors appear on a recent crawl report. <br />Any assistance with resolving this would be greatly appreciated.</p> CUNY Academic Commons - Documentation #3565 (New): Load Newest inconsistencieshttps://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/issues/35652014-10-16T17:39:49ZChris Steincstein@bmcc.cuny.edu
<p>Right now Load Newest button is only showing for mobile devices and only on the Everything filter.</p>
<p>Ideally it would always show, but if it is too difficult right now to get it working with the filters then it could just be added for non-mobile sizes.</p> CUNY Academic Commons - Documentation #2666 (Assigned): Update About Texthttps://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/issues/26662013-07-10T18:28:39ZChris Steincstein@bmcc.cuny.edu
<p>Following the conclusion of this ticket <a class="issue tracker-2 status-5 priority-4 priority-default closed" title="Feature: Add social media icons to About page (Resolved)" href="https://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/issues/2663">#2663</a> we should consider revising the text on the About page. Right now it just has the mission statement and a link to our Wikipedia entry. Neither of them is a direct way of answering on the page the question "what is the commons?"</p>
<p>The assumption is that the "what is" question is the one most people have in mind followed by questions like, "why was it made," "who makes it," "who pays for it,"how long has it been around," some of which are answered and some not.</p>
<p>If we do decide to rewrite it, there is the question of the tone of voice. Right now it is very formal with just the mission statement. Do we want to keep it formal or go for something more informal?</p>
<p>If others agree we should get into this I can take a stab at it (other volunteers welcome too).</p>