Features to bring back in new crabgrass version

Please try out the new crabgrass and add features that were removed in the new version to this list and sort it in order of your own prioritees as a user.

This will help us focus on the things that people are missing now.

Oh… and please add the things you miss unless they are listed as things we removed on purpose ;)

azul, thanks for the invitation to add stuff which I am delighted to immediately accept ;-)

Hmmm, my two additions were not removed, they were already (what I consider) broken in the old version. I really do consider them to be essential for crabgrass and they have been pointed out and requested several times during the past years (not just by myself). BUT, while they can be considered broken/buggy privacy features, strictly speaking they are not features that could be brought back – shall I remove them from the vote again?

maquis, I think moving them to the wishlist of minor or major new features in the users feedback group would be best. Looking at the two i would say they are minor in terms of the effort needed.

Those lists are old and i have not looked at them in a while. But i would love to bring them back to live – hoping that more people will engage in this process if they notice their choice actually matters.

Activity of peers and contacts – this never worked well, and presented like spam. I think this is unneeded noise and is more of a social network function then a groupware function and should not be a part of the new crabgrass.

Welcome Section – a new users UX needs to be developed. And the welcome board could be part of it, but shouldn’t just be brought back as is.

Stars are great.

Sidebar with networks – We simplified the dashboard view so we can build it out to better focus on work, and things that require attention. The list of groups and people, does not change with a high frequency and is also easy to access with a hover. What is displayed in the hover needs to better reflect where you go to most. I would propose making what is shown in the hover more relevant and more robust and just have one place to access the users and groups, not two. I think when we reintroduce a sidebar, it should help us access the information we most need. Adding back the sidebar convo should be in the context of a wholistic conversation about what we want the dashboard to be in the future.

@azul: I think it’s a great idea to bring back the wishlist for major and minor features in the users feedback group – but I would suggest to start a new one and drop/archive the outdated pages. What do you think?

@mcnair: On the sidebar with networks/groups/contacts: Maybe I’m not a typical crabgrass user but I actually use several active groups and often, when I log in, I want to quickly access those groups and dropt some information there that’s necessary for progress. A sidebar makes it easy to do that, a hover option with a second click for groups that are used less often seems more cumbersome to me. This is not an important issue, but maybe we should try to get some user feedback on this once the new version (without sidebar) is up to see what people think and either keep the simplified dashboard or revert to the sidebar variant.

@azul: I just noticed that I can’t delete the items I entered – I’m assuming only the owner/creator of the page can do that. If that’s so, please delete

* Profile Permissions: Distinguish between "public" as in "for 
  all logged in users" and "for the whole web" 
* Add visibilty settings for "recently updated pages list" in 
  profile permissions

and I will add them to the wishlist once we have decided wether to start that from scratch or reactivate the old pages…

@maquis, I think it’s a great idea to start the votes on the users feedback from scratch. I think the active users probably changed quite a bit in between and it would be a pitty if people who want to get involved now will be heard less because there are so many old votes around.

Ok, I can create the new pages and move the old ones to archive, so they’ll be available for later inspection. If you can grant permissions to me I would also like to add some german translations to the user feedback start page, so that hopefully more german-speaking users will start to contribute (again?).

my concern with the wiki diff code is that i think it is likely to be a source of security problems.

When I click on ‘Edit my vote’ here on this page I get: “Sorry. You do not have the access to perform that action.” I think that’s because I only have write permissions (by being a member of the group ‘user feedback’).

@elijah: could you expand on that slightly? Is there a general problem with running diffs or are you refering to possible problems within the existing cg code of the diff function(s) and hinting it may be necessary to rewrite?

parsing html and creating an html diff is a hard problem, which is why there are no stable and well maintained libraries that do that. I worry the the unmaintained scripts we were using before are very likely to have security problems with regards to character encoding and html parsing.

- featured pages were useful : do you plan to keep them ?

- i would prefer to see the networks separated from the groups in the top menu

- is it possible to show the commissions inside the groups publications, so that it is possible to know which post belongs to which commission when you are on main page, as in the profile ?

hi lunerai,

thanks for your feedback.
- I think we’ll bring back a similar functionality like featured pages at some point. Not necessarily a priority now though.
- I have no opinion on groups / networks separation
- the page owner is already there. It’s just hidden with css right now. But I can see how it would be useful. In particular for groups like riseup.

I added featured pages to the list above.

Current attempts to edit my vote fail. It seems that my edits are not saved (after editing my vote, visiting “show results” and then returning to “edit my vote” all items are back to where they were before the last edit).

As a user who is working with various groups on Crabgrass, if I cannot easily reference the tasks assigned to me from those various groups I find the feature much less useful.

Also the Notices section isn’t as efficient as the Notification Inbox. It only tells you somebody made a change on the page, what the change was is more difficult to determine. If they make 8 changes to a page in succession, I have 8 notifications that don’t tell me anything except that so-and-so made a change x8. I did not login for one day and had 4 pages of notifications that I was unable to really gain anything from.

maquis, can you try again?
It worked for me and a fix to the ranked vote pages was applied recently. However i don’t know if it really is fixed or just happening for you.
Thanks.

seryn, Good points! We really need to work on the notification system in particular for the case you are describing. I have hardly watched pages at all – so i have not seen this issue yet.

i feel bad about admitting this, but the primary reason there is no ‘my tasks’ link anymore is that i just was not sure where to put it.

i agree that notices need some work, but i never found the inbox very useful. i think we can improve the notices so that they are less noisy. labs.riseup.net/code/issues/9415

also, notices need more information, like what the nature of the change was.

Elijah, what if the My Tasks page was listed under the Me drop down menu?

Feature #9415: Regarding the Notices section, perhaps it could have a link that expands the section; similar to the way the welcome section functioned on the previous version. I agree the notification counter may be helpful.

Tasks functionality has disappeared. This was quite powerful in that all tasks assigned to a member of a group in multiple to do lists were pulled to “my tasks” on your homepage. The Task list post type needs work but is pretty useless without this functionality.

elijah
“My Tasks” could be reinstated on the drop-down Me menu!

Bring back the welcome section but allow it to be overwritten!!!

Make the Me dashboard editable (like group private wiki dashboards) so that you can pull together your own links to key pages across groups. I use tables of links at the top of groups to make pages sticky.

e.g.

|[Link1->link]|[Link2->link]|[Link3->link]|

I agree that highlighting the last change is important.

the toc thing is just a bug that will be fixed soon. sorry about that.

there’s a pull request for the toc now.

@elijah: thanks for toc thing, I thought it was a strange thing to change but I didn’t know any other way to report it.

elijah, is there still a My Tasks page that I could book mark the url in my browser?

no, but i will take a look this friday and see if it can be added back without too much work.