CUNY Academic Commons

+1 to bumping the font size up a bit for everything.

As part of the redesign, perhaps the forum layout can be looked at as well.

I think there is a way to change the default forum layout - threaded vs. most recent/chronological because I remember working through a bug where the views kept changing. I think most faculty do not know they can toggle the forum view. Would it be possible to make this more obviously, possible by moving this toggle somewhere more prominent?

Right now, you can change threaded vs. linear display on your "My Settings > Forums" page. For enhancements, we have an existing ticket -- #13358.

We can also add some documentation to the help site. I couldn't find a dedicated section about configuring forum settings there.

For the other feature request, I can see the benefit of some sort of tool that allows a user to easily see those posts that have not been read.

Something could be done with cookies, but it wouldn't be very accurate. We can determine the last post in a thread and mark that as the last seen one. Then subsequent visits to the thread can check the current thread against the last seen marker and do some styling based on that.

I wouldn't really do this though. Changing the background color can be jarring and isn't really good for usability. We already have a notifications system that does "mark as read/unread" functionality via BuddyPress. We can probably piggyback on that somehow and make this more prominent or easier to use. Edit - this idea wouldn't really work well based on the OP's use-case.

I forgot to mention that we can revisit the specific issues mentioned and see how we could solve those during the Redesign of the Forum.

Hi All,

Yes, increased font size/readability on forum posts was the request; I think increasing font size in the forum is a good place to begin and other options could be discussed as part of the larger redesign.

I think working through the other ticket for the improved "threaded" toggle would be one way to address the other half of this request for some type of flagging of previously unseen forum posts.

Boone Gorges wrote:

Thanks for chiming in, Sonja. Your mockups show increased font size on the group activity stream (see https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/groups/cunydhi/) The original report, as I understood it, was around forum posts (see https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/groups/cunydhi/forum/topic/coded-bias-film-screening-and-conversation-7/). Laurie, am I understanding this correctly? Sonja, do you recommend a similar change here?

Thanks, Boone for clarifying what was referenced. Yes I'd recommend increasing the font size for the reply content to 14px for body copy and adjust the line height to about 1.2rem. Appreciate you looping me in.

For the other feature request, I can see the benefit of some sort of tool that allows a user to easily see those posts that have not been read.

I'm going to go back to my idea of utilizing the BuddyPress notifications system to highlight unread forum posts in a thread.

It's technically very efficient and utilizes existing frameworks without reinventing the wheel.

Currently, when a topic author or reply author receives a reply to their forum post, bbPress creates a BuddyPress screen notification, which is visible from the admin bar or on your "My Notifications > Unread" page. When you click on the notification link, it takes you to the forum post and marks the notification as read. bbPress doesn't do anything special after that.

My idea is to hijack the unread notification link to add a URL marker like bbp-unread with the first unread post ID. From there, we can highlight any unread posts in the thread. Whether we want to change the background color of unread posts or do something else design-wise is up for discussion, but I feel that this would be a decent way to tackle unread forum posts while using the existing BuddyPress Notifications component.

Hi Ray,

Thanks for this! It sounds like exactly what this prof was hoping for.

The font size changes suggested by Boone and Sonja changes sound good too.

Thanks, Ray. I agree that the notifications table is a good technical tool for this job.

I'm a bit worried about how noisy this will be. Will there be one notification per thread? Will they be collapsed in the context of the toolbar dropdown? If I'm a member of a couple different active groups, this could very quickly become a pretty long list.

The only thing I'm adding at the moment is a marker to the unread notification URL so we can highlight the unread posts before bbPress marks those notifications as read. I'm not changing the way bbPress records or formats notifications.

I have some code ready to go for my approach. Here's a screenshot:

I've just highlighted the background to light yellow, but any other suggestions would be great.

Will there be one notification per thread? Will they be collapsed in the context of the toolbar dropdown? If I'm a member of a couple different active groups, this could very quickly become a pretty long list.

In the toolbar, if you have multiple forum reply notifications, bbPress will group together all these notifications into one with the text, "You have X replies". See:
https://github.com/bbpress/bbPress/blob/f3271446ee389a3ddc1dec3579759d15de9fb7ec/src/includes/extend/buddypress/notifications.php#L86-L97

However, when you click on this link, it links to the first unread forum thread, which is wrong to me:
https://github.com/bbpress/bbPress/blob/f3271446ee389a3ddc1dec3579759d15de9fb7ec/src/includes/extend/buddypress/notifications.php#L69-L81

This link should preferably change to the "My Notifications > Unread" page filtered by unread forum replies. I'll work on fixing this.

The "My Notifications" page could also be designed better. It's been awhile since anyone has touched BuddyPress notifications, so we could definitely make some improvements here.

Just to further note, only the topic author and the reply author receives screen notifications. Not the whole group:
https://github.com/bbpress/bbPress/blob/289ecc0c7dc565935bbf5e856e4187b0d3296586/src/includes/extend/buddypress/notifications.php#L155-L168

Notifications for the reply author only work if the previous forum poster either clicked on the "Reply" or "Quote" link before composing their reply:

Awesome - thank you for clarifying this. Somehow I missed that this was a bbPress feature. Your improvements seem right to me, especially the one about the link that goes to the first unread thread.

IMO the yellow is not too bad, as long as it still passes AA contrast levels (note that we will also be bumping up the font size, which also helps with contrast).

I've made some changes in a separate try/unread-forum-notifications branch. (Commits)

Here are some updated screenshots:

I've added a "New" badge for unread posts in addition to the background color change. The yellow background color uses the same color as the one bbPress uses and it passes contrast accessibility. The badge background color uses the same one as the blue notification from the admin bar.

In the dev chat, we also threw around the idea of fading out the background color. I decided not to do this for now since this would require targeting the scrollbar and seeing if unread posts are in the current viewport. I can add this as an enhancement in a later revision if we feel it is needed.

I've also taken the time to improve the "My Notifications" page. You can now manage notifications in bulk. I've also added a "Filtered by forum posts" heading when you click on the You have X new replies notification from the admin bar.

Let me know if there is anything else we want to do here.

Wow, this looks great!

Agreed, thanks so much Ray! Let's try to touch on this during the dev call today before proceeding, especially with Sonja if she can't weigh in before then.

Hi Ray,

Thanks so much for this it looks great!

Just a question -- does this mean you will get a notification for every forum post, so a professor could potentially have 30+ notifications per class session? Or are all replies to a single topic collected into one notification and when the user clicks, they are taken to forum and new posts are highlighted and tagged as 'new'?

I just want to make sure I understand how bbpress is working here and how this update will function so I can explain to faculty. Maybe we can revisit briefly on the call today.

Thanks!

Thanks Ray for being proactive to solve this. Looks good to me. Really like the bulk edit feature for notifications – that's something that we received a comment about in our user survey.