CUNY Academic Commons

#17050 outlined how the activity favoriting feature has not worked for the past five years.

To remind everyone how the activity favorite feature works, you can click on the "Favorite" link in the activity stream to favorite an item. See attached GIF. On the Commons, the places where you can favorite an activity item would be on the current News page or on any user's Commons Profile Activity page. To find out which activity items you have favorited in the past, you can visit your Commons Profile's "Activity > Favorites" page.

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On a previous dev call, we mentioned removing the activity favoriting feature due to limited usage.

I ran some numbers with the following database query before the fix in #17050 was deployed:

select user_id,meta_value from wp_usermeta where meta_key = 'bp_favorite_activities' and meta_value != 'a:0:{}' and meta_value > '' order by char_length(meta_value) desc;                                                                            

And found that between when the activity favoriting feature was introduced in 2010 until when it stopped working in 2017:

• 305 users favorited 1+ items
• 83 users favorited 2+ items
• 42 users favorited 3+ items
• 24 users favorited 4+ items
• 21 users favorited 5+ items
• 7 users favorited 8+ items
• 4 users favorited 20+ items
• 1 user favorited 60+ items

I ran the same DB query just now and one new user favorited something over the past week. Take that as you will.

To remove the activity favoriting feature, we can remove the Favorite button from the activity stream. Should we also remove the "Activity > Favorites" page from a user's Commons Profile altogether? Or keep it for the 306 users that have favorited something?

Another alternative is leaving the activity favoriting feature alone and perhaps re-introducing it with some documentation and better repositioning. For example, we can add a "Favorites" tab to the redesigned Activity page (#16535) and perhaps renaming the tab to something more palatable like "Bookmarks"?