Activity Flags have to Go
December 23, 2011 in
Please see the attached image.
We have these stupid activity flags all over the website. They have to go.
They discourage people from joining groups, they add useless clutter to the screen and the slow us down by having to calclulate every time a page loads.
If we can turn them off in the Admin panel, great. If not, then we either find a new template or re-write this one.
Related posts:
Shaun MacRae said on January 7, 2012
I don’t see an attached image?
Shaun MacRae said on January 10, 2012
Thanks for attaching the image.
I don’t find they clutter the screen. The flags also don’t take any time to calculate. Activity status is a property of the group itself (like name) that get’s updated every time someone interacts with the group. So this property is grabbed from the db at the same time the group name is.
I agree they may discourage people from joining when they read that a group hasn’t been active in some time though. Is it possible we need to think about the root of this problem and actually get the activity levels up? Hiding the activity level may be kind of like ignoring the problem. Although it’s also a ‘chicken-before-the-egg’ scenario isn’t it?
At the moment our groups don’t have anything to offer. No photo galleries, no videos, no content really. So people aren’t joining them. Is this a good time to start migrating the content from our old site? i.e. /clubs
In the meantime, I’ll look for options on hiding the activity flags but they are pretty core to buddypress and social networking in general so I don’t think there will be any configuration option to turn them off or any themes that will disclude them. We could write our own theme, but it would be a noteworthy project.
Brent Johner said on January 10, 2012
Once all Free Public Groups have scorekeeping functions, players will start to use them. Then they will start to use the galleries and other features. Then the groups will get some traction and start attracting many more users.
I would rather have the option to hide the activity flags for now, but if BuddyPress does not offer that option, then we need to up the activity levels by adding scorekeeping to every public group and having those scores reported to the activity stream.