User status overview

Contribute Feature

AI-generated summary

In a discussion about the new User Status feature, mattdm proposes three enhancements to improve usability and visibility. First, they suggest displaying full user statuses — not just icons — on the site’s about page, especially for admins and moderators, to make their availability quickly visible. Second, they recommend adding a flag to distinguish between “away” statuses (indicating unavailability) and “fun” or casual statuses, ideally paired with a visual indicator like a faded user icon. This flag could also allow sorting on the about page, prioritizing “present” users. They note that relying on icon conventions (like a palm tree for absence) is impractical in larger communities. Third, they propose a calendar view — possibly limited to “away” statuses or filtered by group (e.g., the Docs team) — to provide a clearer, aggregated overview of user availability. These suggestions aim to build on the new User Status feature while addressing limitations of the older holiday calendar plugin, which never gained broad adoption due to insufficient practicality. mattdm offers to split these into separate threads if needed, acknowledging their distinct scopes.

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Continuing the discussion from User Status:

I’m thinking about the new User Status feature and the older holiday calendar plugin — which never really quite worked usefully-enough for us to enable and encourage broadly (see Calendar plugin features to make it really useful for us).

The new thing looks great, but it’d be nice to have an overview as well. To that end, I have three requests (which I can break into three threads if that’s useful, since they’re really very separate in scope).

  1. The first, which I hope is relatively easy: Include status on the site “about page” (this one). Ideally, that’d show the full string, not just the icon. That way, it’d be easy to quickly find the statuses of admin and moderators.

  2. The second: include a flag to indicate whether this a given status means “away” or status or just … fun. Knowing our community, lots of people will set these for various reasons, which I am all for — but reduces the particular practicality. Ideally, this would also cause some other visual clue, like a faded user icon or … something. The about page list could also actually sort by this, showing “present” members first. [1]

  3. And finally: it might be nice to have an actual calendar view. Maybe not showing all statuses, but at least showing the “away” ones. And/or, showing the statuses of members of a given group.[2]

  1. A workaround for this is to choose some icon to signify absence — like the palm tree. But … on any community bigger than, say, three people, that’ll nearly impossible to keep consistent ↩︎

  2. For example, the Docs team could have their own such calendar. ↩︎

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