CUNY Academic Commons

FYI she is talking about group forum posts; I think it might be a nice feature to add.

Also, she is a new Commons user and a new student in our MA in DH program, starting this Fall. It's good to get a feature request from a new user!

(also I am wondering whether there are BbPress plugins we could easily add to create this functionality; I can't imagine that they don't already exist)

I'm unconcerned about the technical parts of the request. There are existing tools; most are likely to need some customization to work for us. See eg https://wordpress.org/plugins/likebtn-like-button/#description.

A few primary questions. There may be lots of other questions, depending on the answers to these:
1. Where does this appear in the forum interface, and what should it look like?
2. Do the likes do anything other than display counts/buttons on the items themselves? (Are they surfaced in search results? Can you sort/filter by likes? Can a user see a list of items he's liked?)
3. Do we envision a future where other things - sites, users, specific profile fields, activity updates, blog posts, blog comments - can be liked?

For the record, I think that emoji reactions are more 2018 than a simple Like button. Likes are more of a popularity measure, while emoji reactions can potentially be part of a conversation (votes, etc). https://wordpress.org/plugins/bp-reactions/

Assigning to Erik for thoughts about whether/how this might fit into the Commons.

*EDIT: Using Facebook's emojis and other icons for example purposes only. Could we use ones provided by plug-ins Boone suggested? *

This is a fun one! See attachments for some mock-ups.

I agree with Matt in that the like feature should appear in the same grouping as our other post "actions" - reply, quote etc. That's where users will be looking to take action. I'm in favor of including the ubiquitous thumbs up icon alongside the "Like" text ("like button placement.png"). Like "statistics" could be displayed below the post actions ("like stats placement.png").

Emojis seem like a reasonable ask, and I like Boone's idea of them supporting interaction among group members. As such, we might allow users to click the like "stats" and pull up a list of people who liked the post ("like stats clicked 1.png"). Including an "Add Friend" or "Send Message" option in the modal window could facilitate further conversation ("like stats clicked 2 modal.png").

Boone Gorges wrote:

2. Do the likes do anything other than display counts/buttons on the items themselves? (Are they surfaced in search results? Can you sort/filter by likes? Can a user see a list of items he's liked?)
3. Do we envision a future where other things - sites, users, specific profile fields, activity updates, blog posts, blog comments - can be liked?

I think these are good questions but would prefer holding off until we have some more evidence that users would find such features useful. Sticking to what's being asked for in the ticket, the ability to like a post and then for the poster to receive appropriate feedback. Keeping the metadata info would set us up to possibly implement these features down the road, yeah?

In terms of notifications, 2 places come to mind: in the group's "Recent group activity" and in the "notifications" sidebar ("notifications.tiff") when logged into the Commons. Matt, to your point about likes focused specifically within the group context/interface, it seems like "recent group activity" is the place for them rather than the "notifications" bar.

Thoughts?

Thanks, Erik! This feels well thought-out.

Regarding emoji reactions vs like - my thought is that they're mutually exclusive, and if you used emoji, then you wouldn't use the term 'LIKE' anywhere. So the Like toggle might be a smiley or something (this is the way it works in Slack and on Gitub). I'd also suggest that counts - at least, unified counts - don't make much sense in this context. You'd need the counts to be broken out on a per-reaction basis. See attached screenshot (github 1) of how Github does this. If we go with Like only, it's a bit simpler.

As sketched here, the project is a pretty large one. In addition to the Like toggle/count interface, we'd have new popups for selecting responses and viewing existing responses, as well as all notification integration. It may be worth considering whether it's possible or prudent to build a scaled-back version of this that is still worth using. What would a staged implementation look like? Say, for instance, we built the toggle interface alone, with a simpler interface to see likes (see hover state in screenshot github 2). Then, we develop some mechanism (user testing, analytics, etc) for determining whether a v2 was necessary or wise.