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Feature #15646

closed

Forum improvements

Added by Matt Gold over 2 years ago. Updated over 2 years ago.

Status:
Duplicate
Priority name:
Normal
Assignee:
Category name:
Group Forums
Target version:
-
Start date:
2022-03-16
Due date:
% Done:

0%

Estimated time:
Deployment actions:

Description

I wanted to bring up a few issues for discussion, based on a recent experience searching for posts in a group forum with a lot of posts (over 1,923 topics):

1. Post Dates: In the main group forum listing, the right-hand column lists the "last post" for a given topic, but does so by offering a temporal comparison from the current moment -- e.g. "20 hours, 19 minutes ago." This gets less and less useful as one goes back in time -- right now, for instance, I'm looking for a post I made in January, but I'm having to sort through temporal markers like "3 weeks, 2 days ago," which require calculation on my end. I think it would be a lot simpler if we just listed a time/date stamp instead for when the last post was made.

2. Failed Search: My browsing through the forum post list was occasioned by a failed search. I was looking for "excellence fee" in this private group - https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/groups/ma-in-digital-humanities-cuny-graduate-center . When I searched for those words, with or without quotation marks, nothing came up. But, as evidenced by this post -- https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/groups/ma-in-digital-humanities-cuny-graduate-center/forum/topic/student-tech-fee-excellence-fee-opportunities-2/ -- there was a post with the subject "excellence fee" included (fyi, I tried both "fee" and "fees")

3. Outdated Language: When a search comes up empty, one sees the message "Oh, bother! No search results were found here." "Oh, bother" is a bit anachronistic, and I'd like to see us move towards more modernized language.

4. Search pagination: when one is browsing through a forum, particularly one with a lot of pages of posts, the pagination is a bit wonky. When one is on, say, the 7th page of results of a forum with 129 pages of posts, the choices for moving forward are: 1 2 3 …6 7 8 …127 128 129. I think we should show at least two or three pages forward from where one is to help people move forward more quickly. Or, perhaps, we could add a box where people could skip ahead to a particular page of results.

--

Of course, the big question with ALL of this is whether this is a particularly unique use case. This particular group is used basically as a listserv for an academic department, so we are constantly forwarding messages to it. I think that the above issues are worth considering not just for groups like this, but also for groups like CUNY DHI, where a lot of opportunities are forward. But they are obviously less pressing for a more low-traffic group, and thus we should think about whether any of the above fixes are worth resource allocations. At any rate, I post all of this here as food for thought.


Related issues

Related to CUNY Academic Commons - Feature #15647: Improved "date" column in group forum displayResolvedRaymond Hoh2022-03-16

Actions
Related to CUNY Academic Commons - Bug #15648: Group forum search doesn't always return correct resultsResolvedRaymond Hoh2022-03-16

Actions
Related to CUNY Academic Commons - Feature #15649: Change "oh bother" text when no forum topics are foundResolvedRaymond Hoh2022-03-16

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Related to CUNY Academic Commons - Feature #15650: Improve pagination for group forumsResolvedRaymond Hoh2022-03-16

Actions
Actions #1

Updated by Boone Gorges over 2 years ago

  • Related to Feature #15647: Improved "date" column in group forum display added
Actions #2

Updated by Boone Gorges over 2 years ago

  • Related to Bug #15648: Group forum search doesn't always return correct results added
Actions #3

Updated by Boone Gorges over 2 years ago

  • Related to Feature #15649: Change "oh bother" text when no forum topics are found added
Actions #4

Updated by Boone Gorges over 2 years ago

  • Related to Feature #15650: Improve pagination for group forums added
Actions #5

Updated by Boone Gorges over 2 years ago

  • Status changed from Assigned to Duplicate

Of course, the big question with ALL of this is whether this is a particularly unique use case. This particular group is used basically as a listserv for an academic department, so we are constantly forwarding messages to it. I think that the above issues are worth considering not just for groups like this, but also for groups like CUNY DHI, where a lot of opportunities are forward. But they are obviously less pressing for a more low-traffic group, and thus we should think about whether any of the above fixes are worth resource allocations. At any rate, I post all of this here as food for thought.

The answer to this is likely different for each item, and in any case they're all separate in terms of their implementation, so I've opened separate tickets and I'll close this one out.

Actions #6

Updated by Matt Gold over 2 years ago

thanks!

Actions #7

Updated by Matt Gold over 2 years ago

I do think that tweak would be very useful, though

Actions #8

Updated by Colin McDonald over 2 years ago

Hi Matt, which tweak are you referring to in your last comment on this ticket? Sorry, just catching up on this, and thanks Boone for splitting this into separate tickets to follow individually from here on.

Actions #9

Updated by Matt Gold over 2 years ago

Colin McDonald wrote:

Hi Matt, which tweak are you referring to in your last comment on this ticket? Sorry, just catching up on this, and thanks Boone for splitting this into separate tickets to follow individually from here on.

I . . . don't know!! I must have put that comment into this ticket mistakenly; I think I meant to add it to one of the tickets that Boone created.

Actions #10

Updated by Colin McDonald over 2 years ago

Ok, no worries!

Actions #11

Updated by Sara Cannon over 2 years ago

"Or, perhaps, we could add a box where people could skip ahead to a particular page of results."

I've seen "go to page" in paginations before. We could implement something like: https://capture.dropbox.com/Szu41jcQV1SD9TIl

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