CURRENT FEATURE REQUEST¶

We are now using redmin on labs.riseup.net/code to manage features and bugs.

See labs.riseup.net/code/projects/crabgrass...

OLD FEATURE REQUESTS¶

Assets¶

Change name of files

you need to be able to change the name of an asset (both pages and attachments)

Calendar¶

Will Crabass eventually feature a group calendar that is linked, perhaps to a network page where other group’s calendar events are displayed, therefore allowing all groups another opportunity for connecting with one another?—plus the main network page could have other features for the entire community, such as admin announcements, etc.

Chat¶

indicate when new chatting has happened since you were last in the room, either by a red underline or by making the name bold
indicate how many people are in the chat room
option to save the chat (log) and post as attachment in the group
option to clear out the saved chat log from the server.

Coalition Building tool for events¶

During events, groups in addition to individuals can endorse events with various levels of interest or collaboration. This feature would actually allow groups to share in the responsibility of event planning and management. The idea would be for the initiating group to contact other groups within the network, and if they choose to actively support or endorse the event, and especially if they contribute resources or people, they can have the option to join a coalition, temporary while the event is being planned or happening (or through continued collaboration). This coalition relationship will be dissolved at the end of said event. Also, each group participating in some way would have (or choose to have) a logo icon by their group in the directory. This idea just came to me tonight, so it may need some clarification.

Comments¶

Ability to see who has twinkled

• I like that twinkles are anonymous. -anonymous

Ability to comment anonymously on public pages, for which you will have this avatar.

Pages that are marked ‘public’ should enable public comments. This means comments from crabgrass users who are not in the group, but also comments from non-crabgrass users!

Comments close up into month sections. This way only the recent month is “open” by default

Committee¶

Change the name to Team or let admins edit what it is called.

• I am not sure this is a good idea. This could be really confusing especially when we add networks. If we let people rename committees and networks to be anything they want, the navigation will be confusingly different for each group you visit, and might be contradictory. -elijah

Allow committees to be made public, even if the parent group is not. Similarly, allow committees to accept join requests, even if the parent group does not. For example, if you have a committee for new volunteers in a private group, it would be nice to be able to have a publicly-viewable home page and to allow join requests.

When a group has lots of committees, it can become very difficult to find anything. It would be useful if you could turn on an option in the parent group that would allow you to see all of the pages in all of the committees. This would be useful in both the group home page and in the tags page.

Dashboard¶

cache the view

Make a static cache of the dashboard, or each element of the dashboard. Eventually, the dashboard is going to include all kinds of things that are going to be very expensive to calculate. It must be cached.

page control buttons

Ajax ability to add star page or add to inbox from dashboard and icon to see what pages are already in inbox.

customization

• Ability to select which groups show up in dashboard
• Ability to “open” and “close” views (today, yesterday, etc).

inbox/dashboard

In both the dashboard and the inbox, create a toggle for viewed/not – i.e., maybe you want to keep a link in your inbox, but you don’t actually want to look at it now, and you don’t want it hanging out all bolded and stuff staring at you. Similarwise, in your dashboard, maybe

Feeds¶

Ning has the ability to have a feed (rss pull) of other blogs inlaid into the main page of a group. pretty slick.

Files¶

(1) Ability to upload various files in one go (ability to set more upload boxes in one go). See fancy file upload

(2) Image gallery for groups (and individuals?) and ability to organize images by tags in sets/folders. in progress?

(3) An individual’s profile should include a feature that includes an image gallery/slideshow effect, with a list (public/private) of existing galleries. This will be important with indymedia sites who want to integrate crabgrass into their news sites—which leads me to

(4) An ability to promote photo galleries to rss feed/newswires or share in a common directory with tags, etc. So that if people want to search by image they can also look by date/time/subject/key word (tag)

Groups¶

• Ability to delete a group

• Ability to contact a group via message if you aren’t a member (and there is no join button)

Group Directory¶

Navigating to the home page for a private group should not return any information to a non-member, not even the existence of the group/page. Right now, when you navigate to a private group’s page as a non-member, cg returns: “This group does not have a public profile.”

• there is no way to prevent someone from testing if a group name exists. all you have to do is try to create a user or group with that name.

Ability to search for groups by region/location and also tags if they have have specified this in their ‘Group Information’.

Will the Group directory become alphabetized too, in addition to this above selection of region/location search, options could also include focus of the group (media reform, critical mass, etc)

Help ticket system¶

Help ticket system

It would be nice to have a button on every page that pops up a help ticket which you can fill in if you have a problem. It would nice if those get kept in a separate place from all the groups etc and are able to be answered by others within the community. This way simple queries can be dealt with by the other users, rather then the techies…

• i like this idea. I think one easy way to do this is to break out the “get involved” link at the bottom into parts. Feature Requests, Report Bugs, and Help. Help link would open a discussion page within the user group. Some embedded explanatory text needed. -daniel

Inbox¶

All these are addressed by the inbox revival.

• Ajax: star, pending, mark items as read and unread
• Nav to next message without going back to inbox
• Toggle Selection Option – wording needs changing, function needs refining
• Created by column (?)
• Keyboard shortcuts

Invites:¶

The ability to invite people outside the crabass network to join crabass/ your group.

*also, upgrade current invite system, like inviting contacts to groups/events, etc with pull down tags.

Level of Commitment feature for individuals

*Facebook has this feature on the main newsfeed page, bottom right, that points out people you may know (like six degrees of separation, or people other people know that you may know too) could help connect people in a unique way.

Something often overlooked with organizations is the amount of time people can devote to a given project or event. Having a way for individuals to establish the amount of time, times, time of day or days of the week, etc they have available (able to be changed if circumstances change) would be very useful for organizers trying to find some reliable help.

Navigation¶

Recently viewed pages drop down, perhaps in masthead.

Networks¶

Will there be a way, once crabass is released, to search for and identify other local crabass networks, perhaps how indymedia does with city lists or facebook does on the networks page? Since Crabass is a decentralized idea in social networking, which is great, I think it would also be nice if all local installs had the tools for searching or listing all other known networks. This would be helpful for a number of reasons.

This would be really cool, but seems like it could get really complicated. At least, if you wanted to do anything complicated with it (allowing some sort of association with groups on other installs). Then again, just providing a search api (for public pages) and an easy way to plug in other crabgrass installs wouldn’t be too complicated and could be really useful. -dbpatterson

Simple Networking Ability: Lets say there are 12 local imcs. They want to create a single place where are the individuals in the locals can collaborate. They create the NorthEast IMC Network. Each group would then sign up to the network confering admin permissions to everyone in each group. The groups would be displayed on the network page, just like committees are now, but the Network would not have access to the groups beyond their public information. So permission scheme is opposite of the current committee to group permission setup. More structured networks could limit who has write access to only a few spokespersons from each group and perhaps allow commenting by everyone. Graphical permissions setup with boxes representing groups and networks that you can drag around would be sweet.

Network viz of the community¶

Would be great to have a way to get an overview of the entire community, who is linked to whom, what projects are linked by multiple members. I think that this might be pretty doable with some of the shelf network viz stuff, like GraphViz, at least until things get really huge. And I don’t think other software plat forms have this. For an example (disclaimer, I worked on it) check out oilmoney.priceofoil.org imagine replacing oilcompanies with groups, and congresspeople with crabgrass members. -skyebend

Notify¶

A way to reference notify messages. Right now they are lost as soon as you click on the message.

Pages (general)¶

Page Info on top of each page: date, time, who / when created, last modified etc.

Two tiers of “public” pages, one viewable by anyone in the world, the other viewable by crabgrass users outside of the admin set.

• what you call them?
  • public and shared… or maybe protected for c++ fanatics. :)

A way to create non-wiki pages from inside a wiki-page (by using greencloth brackets syntax).

A generate way to tell what has changed for every page type.

Personal Message Tool¶

Ability to introduce 2 people to each other.

Pictures, please¶

The ability to add additional pictures to user profiles, and to be able to view them at non-cropped resolutions, would be swell. Or full-on support for multiple avatars per user?

Profile Images¶

• A way to adjust how the Thumbnail is positioned for images not exactly square.

• Allowing transparency in .png images

Ranked Voting Tool (The Ballot)¶

A view to show how everyone votes, and how similar their tallies are

Requests¶

Ability to decide to stop receiving requests-to-join from groups you’re part of (especially if they’re busy ones)

Social Bookmarking¶

It’d be great to be able to share bookmarks with others.

Spreadsheet¶

Will there be some sort of spreadsheet application in crabgrass? like google docs/spreadsheet collaboration tools?

• See javascript applications

Straw Poll (The Decider)¶

A concise table view for easy comparison of possibilities

Tags¶

Ability to set tags for specific files, so it is possible to search for a filetype and a set of tags. Or is this already possible?

• if the file is uploaded to an asset page, then yes, it can have tags. Attachments to pages don’t get their own tags (they just use the tags and permissions of the page they are attached to).

Alphabetize list of tasks: Please make it so that the list of tags is in alpha order. It’s so hard when there are loads of tags to find the one you are looking for.

Task List Tool¶

When new tasks are created, the page still lists as not having been modified, so the page stays at the bottom of people’s inboxes. Only way to make it modified is to add to the chat below the task list. Any chance to make new tasks make the page modified?

• i think abie fixed this!!
• I find this really annoying. I hate it when a task list becomes unread every time someone checks off a task. What if there was just a “notify all participants” button. -elijah

Add pagination to task lists, When you load a task list that has a lot of items on it, takes a really long time and then firefox asks you about the javascript taking too long to load and wonders if you want to kill it.

Deleting task should be a ajaxed optoin next to edit icon. Like basecamp. When you click this it should ask to be sure you want to delete incase you clicked it by accident.

When calendaring is added, it would be great to be able to add reoccurring tasks using a template.

Tooltips¶

little windows that appear and show the full title of documents attached to group wiki pages when the mouse hovers over them and the name is too long to fully show in the sidebar. There are probably other places in CG where these would be useful too.

User Profile¶

• link to a ‘profile page’ in the left side menu (after clicking users name) or a rearrangement of the current page to add the details + the current listing

• a user/group map – users locations marked on a map, like google map cuz we are everywhere! that idea could be developed further – i’d love to see data from anarchist yellow pages on a map – without that nasty coutry-state thingis, anyways – groups like infoshops/social centres/squats could mark their spaces on a map

• space to publish the public key

User Accounts¶

Proxy control

It would be cool if users could designate other users to have proxy control of their account. Good for groups with a mix of technical and non-technical people, so the technical people can do things and fix things for the non-techies. Also gives a distributed way to deal with lost passwords and lack of access. Additional possible benefit, could facilitate users with both an public account and a private account. Drawbacks: potentially bad for security.

Creating Users

With the lack of an email address for verification, it would be really easy for spambots to quickly take over this network, I propose a captcha or some sort of sanity check (intelligence test?) when a new account is created. I can’t think of any drawbacks to this, except maybe for braille terminals, but that can be soved with an audio of the captcha.

Deleting Accounts

Right now, there is no way for a user to delete their own account. This should be easy to implement. Sometimes people create multiple accounts because they forget their pw, and then they remember their original pw, but no way to delete the second account.

User Interface and Layout¶

Special views for mobile devices

There should be .wml templates so I can use my phone to browse crabgrass.

Autocomplete

Dropdown or autofill of groups you want to add to access.

I know that users could be enumerated just by trying to create an account with that username, still it would be nice to have an option to remove my account from coming up in the list of all users. I.E. “Make my account hidden”

Blocks: Also another cool igoogle feature, information or features organized into blocks that can be picked up and re-ordered/edited.

Tabs tool¶

Like on igoogle, ability to create new pages that are tabbed I(like my firefox page above with multiple web pages), and easily sorted through, order changed, etc.

Wiki Tool¶

A way to create a wiki from a template, for example Work Log for EGFS template that I fill in every month

Create wiki via email

Ability to see what parts of the wiki are created by who.

• Maybe by clicking on a contributer, all their additions are highlighted

Youtube-like video sharing feature¶

• similar to above, have this as part of an individual/group/network aspect

personal/Group/event/network Bulletin¶

similar to how facebook has a “wall” where people can write or communicate messages without the entire page reloading—type message/comment, etc into a mini window, perhaps with wiki editing elements :) and when submitted it appears in the column below. This would be nice for non-private messages between members, but specifically will be what brings groups like IMC’s into crabgrass, leaving lists behind so they can communicate, such as editorial lists. Plus, is there a way to allow page links to past text into a page block? Just a current thought, but in the case of discussing features, talking about a proposed feature to the newswire, and having a page connected to the post with the proposed feature outside of the message, or linked within the message in such a way that the group page cycles to the front if the link is clicked, within a wiki for the group to collaboratively edit.

Hmm, that seems like more than one feature….