new riverdashboard/activity code loses activity

[cash]

It looks like the 1.8 code is trying to condense similar activity by using a group by clause. I assume this is for multiple profile updates or similar. What does happen is that river activity is getting lost. A user joins a group and then writes a blog post. The group join does not show up on the all activity page.

There also seems to be some oddities with order - older activity gets sprinkled in with newer activity.

[dave]

The new activity river is not only to condense multiple edits on a particular object but it also clusters all activity around the object (comments, likes etc) and then pushes that object with its corresponding activity to the top of the activity stream, in effect trending the object so that a user can see all relevant content relating to it without having to filter through many different river entries.

Items such as group join, friending and profile edit have been left out by design at this stage until we can figure out an effective way to include them. Older items will be included with new ones in the event of an action on the older item, e.g. a comment.

For 1.8 the idea is to keep the activity stream the same as it currently is in 1.7 (hence leaving in all the relevant functions) and just having this new approach as an option as it will not suit everyone.

[cash]

I'll be testing it more but so far it has not been very predictable which feels like a bug to many users.

[dave]

Agreed that unpredictability will feel like a bug to users. More testing would be appreciated as so far - on our various client sites - we have not had any issues reported. Taking these actions out: user profile edits, avatar upload/change, group joining and friending, it should be fairly smooth.

Another reason we have left these items out of this river (other than technical) was based on feedback regarding too much irrelevant noise. People want to get to the heart of discussions that matter to them, not have a river full of friending and avatar changes - happy to explore how this can be improved and indeed figure out if it is just folks we know using Elgg or more wide spread.

[cash]

Probably varies with audience - joining a group is important for our users. Profile updates - not so much. I've been thinking about adding a plugin hook to the add river function so that sites can customize what goes into the river without having to hack plugins/core.

[brettp]

#2415 explains some of why this is happening.

[cash]

Moved this code to riverdashboard plugin