CUNY Academic Commons

That sounds good to me. When they click the link to you envision a separate page with all online people or to just do some JavaScript stuff and show more people on the same page?

Depending on how we do it we also need to think out the logic. If we are showing more on the same page we probably want to show in fixed increments that leave full rows.

I forget what test we use to determine who is online (tangent: is this a variable we want to expose to admins in cbox?) but if it is a hard line (like people who have logged in in the past 1hr) then we could also show the current number of people online and we could also just have the link be "show all" If it is fuzzy (like it just shows the last 20 people who have logged in), then there is no number and "show more" is more appropriate.

In terms placement, if we do "show more" then a link at bottom feels right. But it does present a design challenge as there isn't much room there. If we do "show all" then we could put the link on the top right across from "who's online" and maybe have something like
45 people online, show all
Or
Showing 20 of 45 people online, show all
Where "show all" is a link.

Another thought, if we show on the current page through JS then the link should also be added through JS.

Just had some thime to throw out some thoughts, not enough to edit them.

Can't we just link to the Members directory, which is ordered by Last Active? (That's all "Online" is - active within the last 15 minutes or something like that.)

Sure, that's a valid option. I guess the question is whether we want to make an effort to better quantify and show "who's online". The members directory does show the time since members were last active and order them by that. But it doesn't make it easy to get a quick idea of who's online right now (which of course is an arbitrary number based on whatever time interval we choose).

I'm not sure at this time, with the current features in place, that it matters a great deal to our users who's online right now. If we develop some form of synchronous communication then we will need something that can better show who's online right now and which of your friends are online right now.

If this ticket is mostly about letting people know on the homepage a rough idea of how many people are currently using the site, then I think some text like "showing 15 of 30 members online, view all members", where "view all members" is a link to the members page is fine.

The Members list on the home page under Who's Online is essentially the same list. We may use this ticket to also consider whether to default that list to be ordered by Newest instead of Active so it shows different information at first.

If we want to make things more dynamic we could also add some JavaScript to constantly update the Who's Online list (right now you have to refresh the page to see an updated version). Not sure on the cost/benefit ratio on that one.

On a slight tangent, I'm going to open a ticket about changing the word "People" in the main nav to "Members". We use the word members everywhere except the main nav.

FWIW, I was originally thinking of linking to the member directory, but Chris brings up an interesting possibility.

Couldn't we just make the icons a little smaller and fit in two or three more per section at the bottom of each member column?

On second thought I actually hate my own idea. As you were...

Don't mean to quibble, but I would characterize any change to the way our homepage works as at least "Normal" impact, and probably "High Impact"

Having said that, I'm all for going with the easy solution for now and thinking about other ones at a later point.

Don't mean to quibble, but I would characterize any change to the way our homepage works as at least "Normal" impact, and probably "High Impact"

Disagree. This is something that few people will notice, and for those who do notice, it probably won't really affect their experience of the site in any appreciable way. That's not to say I can't think of reasons why it might be valuable to do something like this, just that, in the grand scheme of things, it will affect a very small percentage of the interactions that people have with the site, which I take as the definition of "low impact".

With the site severity situation settled and attempts at alliterative humor aside, I'm ok with doing the simplest solution for now and we can look back on the other ideas if and when we add some features that would make more precise who's online info valuable to our people. And thanks for the offer Boone, maybe not this time but someday...

Hi Dom: we're going to try to include this in the upcoming major release - can you please implement the 'see more' link on CDEV? Thanks!

I'll move this up my to do list and get a branch over to CDEV for testing as soon as I can.

Is there any way of including it at the bottom right corner of the gray Who's Online box, or would that be a lot more complicated? Please see my original screenshot annotation above for suggested placement

I'm also thinking that we don't need to see that "more members" link there unless there are more members online than can be displayed in the "Who's Online" box. I'm not sure what the limit is , but I think it's 15). If having it appear conditionally only when that many people are online would work, let's try that

Oh -- and thanks for your work on this, Dom.

I don't think it'll be a problem to move it down to the bottom corner. I'll mess around with it right now to see if it ends up being more difficult than I anticipate. And yes, you're correct. Our current limit is 15 members in that widget. The conditional display should also be simple; one if() statement should do the trick.

Thanks, Dom!

Also: adding Chris in case he has any feedback

Hey Dom - The strategy here looks good.

I wonder how useful the "showing x of y" text is. y will refer to the total number of users that BP defines as "Online" (those active in the last 15 minutes, I think). But then, when you click through to the Members directory, you'll see a list of all members - a number much larger than 7. My inclination is just to do this:

<?php if ( $members_template->total_member_count > 15 ) : ?>
    <a href="<?php bp_root_domain() ?>/members">View all members &rarr;</a>
<?php endif; ?>

But I don't feel strongly about it.

I agree that it's best not to show "x of y" numbers because they could be mistakenly understood to refer to total membership numbers rather than recently active.

That's funny that you both bring these points up. Boone, I've already changed the code in my local env to almost exactly what you wrote above. Matt, I was also wondering about the possibility of misunderstanding. I will play around with different/simpler/clearer wording.

Great - thanks, Dom.

Sorry to chime in late. I agree that x of y is unnecessary as it's a somewhat arbitrary number based on last activity anyway. "view all members" works for me as does "view more members." The second one implies there are more people online which is what the goal was.

Is it possible to force the members page to organize the order by Last Active when they visit? I think right now it uses whatever the last ordering was by the user if they're logged in. I'm not sure what the default ordering is but it seems to be alphabetical (there's an oddity there I'll submit a ticket for).

Hey Chris,

Thanks for the feedback. It appears to not matter whether I'm logged in or not, or if I change the "Order By:" dropdown on the Members page - it always defaults to Last Active. I'm not sure if this is a setting somewhere or a BP default though.

Hmm, that's interesting you had that experience. I've found that if I sort it, then leave the page and come back it stays in the last sort order. I just tried it again and that was my experience.

Looks good to me, Dom.

Thanks Boone. Should we lower the limit on CDEV and have a couple people login so we can test it there? I could always lower it now and we could look at it / test it later. Let me know.

Good I'm glad, it turned out to be a simple solution. Which is always nice because it leaves room for iterations if we decide further features are needed. I'm fine with closing this.

Since I wrote this, I'll look into why it's not working as expected.

Boone, I think I fixed the code that was causing the problem. In short, it was not passing the truthiness test to display the "view more members" link.

I basically added an accumulator variable in the while bp_members() loop so that I could check the total number of online users according to the widget. Now I'm checking to see if it == the instance['max_members'] number and only display if it does (which would mean we are at or above the maximum number of users set in the widget admin). This should fix the problem.

Commit: https://github.com/castiron/cac/commit/6f377683c340b0f02227b7b595910daac5cdf919