A user page, but for a group

Feature
1

The Blizzard “highlight all the posts from official Blizzard folks” forums feature has been a common request here, from @bp_ and others.

So I thought, we have

https://meta.discourse.org/users/codinghorror/activity

So why can’t we have

https://meta.discourse.org/groups/discourse-team/activity

which would show all activity from the official Discourse team, for example – or any other named group in Discourse?

The page could be a lot simpler than the user page, with these subtabs:

  • simple flat list of recent posts by any member of the group (default)

  • online state of each group member (last seen time)

… and some of the other features from the user page, but just the essentials.

That would answer a lot of requests for the “Blizzard tracker” feature right off the bat. And it makes sense that a group would have a public page just like a user does, too.

10 Likes
2

Where do you anticipate to surface this link?

PS: wow, I’m late to this party but this new theme is looking pretty good.

3

Hmm, that’s a good point. I hadn’t considered where this link would be visible. Obviously my user page is available by clicking my avatar (CLICK IT! CLIIIICK IIIITTTT! DO IT NOW!) but… where to put the group info?

I guess on my user page it could show which groups I am a member of? That might be handy actually.

And maybe some groups could be linked from the user’s title in the left gutter, e.g. “co-founder” would link to https://meta.discourse.org/groups/discourse-team/activity? Maybe you could say which group was linked from your title, if you have one, on your user page somehow?

4 Likes
4

Yeah, if you have a special title it’d be nice to click through to see some information about it.

OTOH, it’s pretty unclear that clicking on “co-founder” should bring you to the list of Discourse team members.

I’m looking at the way groups were used on freeallegiance.org - the biggest forum I’ve been part of - and it was mainly an ACL method. We’d have:

  • one group per clan (9x)
  • one group per clan officiers (9x)
  • one group per extra officiers (1x)
  • one group per training group (3x)
  • one group per training group trainers (3x)
  • one group per community area (6x)
  • one group per community area leaders (1x)
  • one group per development team (3x)
  • one group per development team friends (3x)
  • one group per super user access (a bunch of them)
  • weird combinations thereof for corner cases

For context, at one point I was a clan member, a clan officier, a trainer, a member of three community areas, a member of two developer friends’ teams and a wiki cop. (Yes, it was the largest forum I’ve been in, but I never said it was particularly large, although it probably was particularly over-engineered.)

Still, I’d have had a pretty hard time picking one hat from all of these, and certainly it wouldn’t fit the entirety of my forum activity. Maybe, down the line, this group digest feature should be tied somehow to the category your posts are made in? …or perhaps the whole setup they had was not particularly compatible with the way Discourse wants to take online communities.

It probably might even make sense to choose the hat, or title, you’re going to wear on a per-post basis, and then filter based on that. Sort of like this:

When you author a post, you get to choose what title to wear, if any:

Replying to post 3 by codinghorror as [a regular forum user [ v ]:
                                      [a regular forum user     ]
                                      [a wiki administrator     ]
                                      [a Steel Fury member      ]
                                      [a Steel Fury asst. leader]
                                      [an events zone organizer ]
                                      [a codinghorror reverse-f…]

If you pick an hat, then the left gutter proudly displays it:

.       bp_               Lorem ipsum quod erat Chromebook non
@codinghorror once said   adaptus ad freehandi circulo mockum up.
 I was pretty awesome     Damnatio!

…and as a result the post is featured on

http://meta.discourse.org/groups/codinghorror-reverse-fan-club

which you could access by clicking on the left gutter grey text.

So, for example, you @codinghorror could decide to be a team member for most things, but when it’s time for the big announcement blog post time or the executive decision, you would sport the super-fancy “co-founder” title to show that you are meaning business and your word is final.

I know you don’t roll like that, I know you probably won’t like this approach, so I don’t expect it to become part of Discourse. It would probably also be overkill for most communities; the very idea of having a title might tempt people into creating 1-man groups for personalized titles, thus missing the point of groups completely.

I think it still makes a modicum of sense and consistency. Also, it’s 2am. Yawn.

2 Likes
5

In the forums we’re setting up right now, this sort of “group activity” window would be exactly what we’re wanting (since we want a DevTracker feature).

Off of what @bp_ is saying, but maybe a bit simpler, for our purposes we would love to just have a single dropdown option in a user’s Preferences page to pick which group they want to be identified with.

For example, I’d be in the groups “admin”, “staff”, and “Developers”, I’d go to my page and select “Developers”. Then when someone clicks on my title, it would go to that group page.

Bonus round:
Each group has their own CSS class (".group-staff", “.group-admin”, “.group-Developers”) which applies to your name formatting, so that when I pick myself to be identified with Developers, I get that formatting applied to my name on the gutter on the left. We would have immediate use for this.

1 Like
6

Since we have the groups page now I think its time to close this.