CUNY Academic Commons

I was never a fan of the folders metaphor and I personally would be glad to get rid of it.

We used to have a panel where the folders were displayed in a list/tree. When we moved to the unified Library, we mapped the bp-group-documents tag/category system (which we'd previously skinned as folders) to the Library tags system. It looks like we left the word 'folder' in the doc edit/create interface. Perhaps a low-hanging fruit is to change this to tag.

As for the list, we show a list of these tags/folders in a dropdown. Whether we need a more visual list for browsing, I leave up to others.

whichever way we go with the above, it seems like there should be some place in the library or group management area where one can create/edit/delete folder/tags, no?

Yes, this seems fine, though it'll need a whole new set of interfaces.

Thank you, Boone. Sara, please let us know what you think re the UX and design issues involved here

One way to do this is by including a little checkbox that is de-selected by default to not include them in the library view unless selected or just remove them from the library all together (my preference for simplicity)

Removing forum attachments altogether seems fine to me. Barring this, I like the idea of a separate checkbox toggle that defaults to off.

Do we want to be able to on the main library screen, view by just all or one tags at a time OR be able to select multiple tags to show (in a multi-select chip UI) I took a ROUGH look at what the chip UI could look like and it seems like it might be overkill and it makes sense to stick with the above.

Multiple select for tags feels like a confusing interface to be, because it's not obvious whether it indicates and "items that have BOTH 'foo' AND 'bar'" or or "items that have EITHER 'foo' OR 'bar'". The use-case for AND feels too limited - few libraries are so large that you'd need it. And the use-case for OR could be realized by simply doing one filter and then filtering a second time. So I'm in favor of leaving these as single-select.

Just in case we have users who get utility out of the forum attachments being in the library, I like the idea of still having the option to show them, but the toggle is off by default. Would it also be possible to give attachment items other tags? Single-select also seems fine to me.

Updating after our dev call today. I think we should consider the following solution:

1. Do not display forum attachments in the group library. This helps define the library space as one in which admins intentionally curate by uploading items to it. The rationale for this is partly that people attach (intentionally or unintentionallY) a lot of things to forum posts, especially when sending via email -- ics files, images, vcards, etc.

2. Create a new way of filtering messages within the forum itself that allows users to view posts that have attachments. This would allow users to find posts with attachments relatively easily. If a user decides they actually want to add a forum attachment to the group library, they can still do so by going to the group library

After a good amount of time discussing this on Friday, I believe we settled on a solution that largely tracks with Sara's initial mockups above:

- Continue to ingest forum attachments into the library, but include a "Show Forum Attachments" checkbox at the top that is unchecked by default, so that you only see non-attachments when you first hit the Library tab. This will remove the clutter that prompted this ticket, but it doesn't remove the attachments entirely. At least this should also be acceptable to anyone who still DOES want the attachments in the library, and we don't have backwards-compatibility issues.

- Allow forum attachments to be tagged other things, in case someone does want to include certain attachments in certain tags of their library. We should also answer whether we have a visible "forum-attachment" tag in the tag list, or if the separate checkbox is enough, which is where I'm leaning. I'm assuming that checkbox will be powered by a distinct attachment tag, whether we show it or not.

- To tackle Matt's point about curation further, we could explore the option to have the Library tab default to a specific tag as defined by the group admin in settings. That way, that tab can be fully customized. We also talked about adding the ability to "pin" library items like you can pin a forum topic. Perhaps these could be features for a later phase depending on how things go with the above changes and further use cases.