I’m posting this to let you know of an issue that might cause confusion for your community members, as it already has for ours.
I love the Activity Stream commenting capability. It enables Twitter-style @mentions/updates/replies and facilitates 1-to-1 public conversations for the community. The problem is that members might be confused between commenting in a group’s Activity Stream versus replying in a group’s Forum. We’ve just launched our community, but I’m already seeing confusion among members in this situation.
The issue works like this:
1. Alice posts in a Group Forum.
2. Her post automatically shows up in the Group’s Activity Stream and gets sent out via email depending on group/individual email settings.
3. Bob later goes to the Group home page and sees Alice’s Forum post in the Activity Stream.
4. Bob wants to reply to Alice’s post, which could happen two ways:
(a) He could click the link to the forum/topic that shows up in the Activity Stream update. This would take him to the forum/topic, where he could enter a reply to the topic in general, or a reply to Alice’s post in particular. This is just a normal reply in a forum. Bob’s reply will also generate an email notification and life goes on.
(b) He could mistakenly comment on the update right in the Activity Stream, thinking he was replying to the original post. His comment will generate a notification to Alice (though I’m not sure Activity Stream notifications are entirely working in CBOX). The email notification Alice receives will say that Bob commented on her update, but the link in that email will take her to the Forum/Topic of her original post … where she will not see a reply from Bob (because Bob commented in the Activity Stream, he did not reply in the Forum). Confusion ensues. Angry-mail gets sent to the system admin. Is the Forum broken?!?
There is already some discussion among the developers @cbox_admin and @r-a-y re: a possible feature to disable Activity Stream commenting within groups to avoid this potential confusion. If you want to disable all activity stream commenting, you could do this:
https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/commons-in-a-box/issues/73
Another option, which I just learned 2 minutes ago from the developer working with us, is that you can switch off activity stream commenting specifically for blog posts and forum posts. That’s what we will do, since I would prefer members to comment on blog posts and reply to forum posts in those contexts (not within the activity stream).
Here’s how:
Go to
Dashboard > Settings > Buddypress > Settings tab
… Activity Settings
… uncheck the box for activity stream commenting on blog/forum posts
Hope I am understanding this correctly and that this is helpful.
All the best +
.
