CUNY Academic Commons

Part of the problem of why the commons@gc.cuny.edu address is receiving a bunch of replies is related to #2685.

As for being able to reply to group announcements via email, this has always been the case. However, if we are stringent that group announcements shouldn't be replied to, we do need to fix this.

It also does sound like RBE should check the activity comment status before manipulating the email headers. So this is a legitimate bug for RBE.

Thanks for reporting, Sarah!

Just going to quote myself from my previous comment:

As for being able to reply to group announcements via email this has always been the case.

Users can't reply to group announcements on the website, but it's technically feasible for a user to reply to one via email if the user is subscribed to the "All Mail" option in the Group Email Subscription plugin. A group announcement is technically just a group status update so if a user is subscribed to "All Mail", RBE will kick in and manipulate the email.

Thanks for clearing that up for me, Ray. I think I was mostly confused by the fact that you could RBE, but not when you're logged in to the site.

What do we want to be the case? It seems to me that, since we block activity comments on group announcements through the UI, we should also block RBE for this activity type as well. Ray, is that something we can easily do?

Boone Gorges wrote:

What do we want to be the case? It seems to me that, since we block activity comments on group announcements through the UI, we should also block RBE for this activity type as well.

Agreed

Do you think we might be limiting group conversation by not having this feature through the UI? I'm not sure if it was decided at a certain point for members not to be able to reply to group announcements to keep conversations in the forums, but at one point we did allow this and IMO it makes sense to members to reply to announcements from group admins. That being said, I'm totally open to what the group wants.

the problem is that you then have conversations taking place in the activity stream and in the forum, which can be confusing -- people can remember that they replied to something but not where they did. I think our strategy is to channel everything to the forums. I hear you, though, that it's not a perfect solution, but I'm not sure that there is one here.

I just looked into this issue a bit more and it appears as though CAC has some custom code that disables commenting on group announcements.

In actuality, there are two Group Announcement plugins:

1. The one used on CAC - there is custom code in the activity entry template that restricts group members from replying using a customized permissions function - cac_activity_can_comment(). This function shouldn't be used in the template, but rather we should hook onto the 'bp_activity_can_comment' filter instead
2. The one available on CBOX - we do not restrict group members from commenting on group announcements

For the purposes of this ticket, I will do the recommendation I set out in point 1 and patch up RBE to check the activity comment status with bp_activity_can_comment().

However, what should we do for the group announcements plugin bundled with CBOX? Should we also restrict replies there as well?

Thanks for digging deeper, Ray.

Your course of action for CAC sounds good. As for cbox, I think that since that functionality is meant to parallel the Commons, we should do the same there too.

I agree. Thanks, Ray.

Awesome, thanks, Ray!

Can you say a little more about this? I assume that the important bit related to the above is bpga_can_post_group_announcements(). Is that new here, or does that exist in the cbox plugin? Just want to be clear how the problem is being solved here, and whether it needs to trickle elsewhere too.

bpga_can_post_group_announcements() already exists in the BP Group Announcements plugin.

The main decision for removing cac-group-announcements in favor of bp-group-announcements was to centralize the group announcement code into one place on CAC. Previously, I didn't know we had another group announcement plugin and had to do some backtracing to find out about cac-group-announcements.

Also, bp-group-announcements has more recent updates to it.