CUNY Academic Commons

I received another ZenDesk piece of default content:

\"nvincantalupo@gmail.com\" 
Yesterday ‪05:53 pm‬

New comment on your post "Welcome!"
Author: Natalia Incantalupo (IP address: 71.127.194.73, pool-71-127-194-73.nwrknj.fios.verizon.net)
Email: nvincantalupo@gmail.com
URL:
Comment:
“She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry” is a documentary that tells us about the history of the Women Liberation Movement, how it was founded and what the main goals and ideas of the movement were. The film covers a timeline from the mid-’60s to the early ’70s, a time when feminism ideals went into masses and unified millions of women all over the country in the hope to achieve more equal roles in society among the sexes. The movie showed interviews with the founders of the feminist movement and leads us through their memories of the movement and the protests that they were a part of.
In my opinion, this documentary brilliantly crushes common stereotypes that some people have about the feminist movement: that feminists are angry, unsatisfied, childless, man-like and man-hating women. Despite these common stereotypes, in the documentary “She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry” we can see strong and brilliant women that focus their lives and energy in an effort to gain better quality of life for all of the women despite their socio-economic status, race and beliefs. The Women Liberation Movement fought in the middle of 20th century for equal pay, for women’s reproductive rights and against objectification of women’s body. Even thought it is hard to overestimate the importance of feminist’s contribution into our society, I feel like modern women don’t always know about it, nor appreciate it enough.

You can see all comments on this post here:
https://wls19.commons.gc.cuny.edu/#comments

Permalink: https://wls19.commons.gc.cuny.edu/#comment-5

This ticket is getting a bit confusing, as it covers a number of adjacent but separate issues. Let me try to break it out, for my own sanity:

1. The comment fields weren't available on a post, even though commenting was enabled for that specific post. This was due to the "close comments on old posts" toggle, described in https://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/issues/11519?issue_count=280&issue_position=1&next_issue_id=11517#note-1
2. The zendesk account is getting notifications of comments on default content. This happens because, since #11482, most content on the template sites is associated with a user called 'Commons Admin'. Thus, when the content is cloned during site creation, it maintains the same author. See for example https://default-template.commons.gc.cuny.edu/wp-admin/edit.php?post_type=page&paged=1. This in itself is intended behavior, and you can safely ignore or delete any notices that come through this channel.
3. What appears to be a spam comment https://wls19.commons.gc.cuny.edu/#comment-5 leaked through on a Welcome post. Marilyn, can you please confirm that this was simply posted to the site in question, and that you didn't take any steps to approve it? I'm wondering whether it was initially quarantined and subsequently released, or whether perhaps it snuck through our filters.
4. Marilyn finds something about the front-end comment interface confusing. I myself am unable to reproduce. When viewing https://wls19.commons.gc.cuny.edu/new-announcement/, the comment fields appear at the bottom of the page regardless of how I arrive at the URL, and regardless of whether I'm logged into the site. When you click the 'Reply' link, the browser scrolls down; perhaps in your tests, you simply couldn't see the fields because the browser wasn't scrolled down far enough? If I'm misunderstanding, or you're seeing something different, perhaps you can record a screencast that demonstrates the issue.

OK to 1 and 2. I'll check in about 3. But my concern is 4. The admin would like to have the students leave comments on this page - https://wls19.commons.gc.cuny.edu/posts/.

I do not see comment boxes on that page. For the Post titled June 11 Responses, I see the phrase "Leave a Reply." For the June 6 Responses, I see "8 replies." If you want to reply on there, you have to know that the secret to doing so is to click om "8 Replies." I think some of the students see the words "8 Replies" and do not know they need to view those comments in order to add their own. See "June 6 and 11" screenshot

Can Krysia and Laurie be added to this ticket?

Krysia and Laurie are already watchers on the ticket.

Thanks for the additional details about https://wls19.commons.gc.cuny.edu/posts/. This is a post listing, not a single post. It's not possible in the majority of WordPress themes to leave comments on a page that shows a whole list of posts - you usually have to click through to the single post page. That matches the behavior I'm seeing here. Not so much a "secret" as a basic concept of how blogs work.

Do others share Marilyn's intuition that having to click through to the single post is confusing?

I think that clicking through to a single post, or clicking the "# replies", is a standard for commenting in WordPress and probably doesn't need to be mare more clear on the blog itself. Moreover, I don't think we should change or alter this behavior since this is consistent across all of WordPress/the Commons and students will need to figure it out eventually. Directions for commenting could be added to documentation in the updated help or teaching on the commons site.