CUNY Academic Commons

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 Outdated Language: When a search comes up empty, one sees the message "Oh, bother!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.

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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.