E.g. http://community.elgg.org/discussion/view/1588172/why-is-there-no-good-free-video-plugins-like-vlc-media-player-for-elgg-and-some-good-themes

This question brought up:

• video players
• themes
• elgg.org vs. elgg.com

IMO, it should have been broken down into two/three questions first before getting answered, but I don't have a good concrete suggestion for handling this case. Do we...

• Just close it and ask the OP to split it up?
• Have a button for moderators to split it up?

It's quite often that someone thinks of another question while reading and responding to an existing discussion. The temptation right now is to hijack the discussion that they are currently on. People even know they are doing this and apologize for it but do it anyways.

If we had an easy button for starting follow-up discussion, that could help. It could also help to just make posting questions easier in the first place.

On community, groups are basically standing in as forum categories. The group listing should reflect that: In the listing the most prominent link should go to the group's discussion listing and a secondary link to the profile.

When I click the page 2 it doesn't seem to give me the second page of results.

See http://community.elgg.org/discussion/view/1587284/why-are-certain-organizations-like-hill-knowlton-featured-on-the-elgg-homepage

Ideas:

• "Add discussion" button always appears on main discussion stream
  • If logged out, clicking prompts for login
  • once logged in, clicking takes user to new discussion form
• As question is typed, similar discussions appear in a second column (like auto complete search, to discourage duplicates)
• Can select target group from the form
• High quality titles are encouraged (visual quality meter?)
• Pasting code snippets is way better (e.g. with http://pierrebaron.fr/PBCKCode/)
• Fast

Can't tell if it's a core issue, or just community, but since a day or so the discussion URLs are missing from the notifications

Could we maybe prefix the notification subject with the group name, so that:

1. It's easier to identify where the discussion is taking place
2. GMail and other clients that group emails into threads do a better job at keeping those grouped by context. Now it's just a long thread that you have to filter to figure out what is what. Now that the Feedback and Planning group is the place for dev discussions, I would like to keep the notifications in one place and prioritize them when scanning my email.

Elgg community discussions at http://community.elgg.org/discussion/all is broken.

Allow non group members to post discussions.

If non-member, display an unchecked checkbox above the submit button with label "Join the Group Name group to receive notifications on group activity." If they submit the checkbox, join them.

Goals:

• Posts needing answers don't get lost.
• Posts that don't get answers are truly bad/unclear posts, not just lost in the void.
• Improve time-to-resolution for community-asked questions.

As is, posts with the most activity wind up at the top, which is good for discussion, but unpopular posts that need answers can slip off the end of the page quickly without anyone noticing. That's pretty discouraging for people who are looking for support.

Here are the basic features I envision:

• New forum posts are marked as "Needs resolution" by default. If the post is only for discussion purposes, you can uncheck the box.
• Existing posts are not marked as "Needs resolution"
• There is a new "unresolved posts" tab under "discussions" that lists posts still needing resolution oldest first.
• Site admins, group admins, and original posters can mark "Needs resolution" posts as "resolved" at their discretion. This closes comments for that post, and takes it off the "unresoved posts" page.
• Can mark a "Needs resolution" post as not needing resolution without closing it and vice-versa (correct mistakes).

More advanced features:

• Maybe auto-resolve posts after an arbitrary time limit if there's no activity?
• Statistics: number of resolved/unresolved posts over time, time-to-resolution, etc.
• Email reminders -- "Did these answers resolve your issue?"

Problem: I suspect people don't generally want to take explicit action to mark their post as resolved. Could end up requiring a lot of manual curation by the admins (urgg...). How to streamline this? Email reminders could help. Auto-resolving could help (e.g. Stack overflow auto-selects one of the answers after a certain period).

Also, remove the "developers" groups category

Groups consolidation:

• Old Group => Group that should subsume old group
• Documentation => Elgg Feedback + Planning
• Third-party integrations => Plugin development
• Internationalization => Plugin Development
• Multisite => Plugin development
• River Dashboard Customization => Plugin development
• Theme Development => Plugin development -- torn on this one

http://community.elgg.org/groups/edit/179063

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 268435456 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 8388608 bytes) in /var/www/community.elgg.org/engine/lib/database.php on line 415 Fatal error: Access to undeclared static property: ElggStaticVariableCache::$__cache in /var/www/community.elgg.org/engine/classes/ElggStaticVariableCache.php on line 91

Originally reported by @brettp as part of #3

When a discussion is marked as a duplicate:

• Close (but don't delete) the duplicate discussion (i.e. no more replies allowed)
• Link to the discussion post for which this is a duplicate (or just auto-forward there?)

Would be great if the UI for selecting which post this is a duplicate of were an ajaxy search thing. Going and finding the GUID works, but is painful.

That would cover:

• giving preview of package contents (files tree, zip packages handling example here: https://github.com/Srokap/srokap_plugin_installer)
• extracting manifests (could display it's data and even compare with declared license/compatibility)
  • automatic extraction of screenshots
• code quality analysis
  • coding standards
  • detect deprecated functions usage - https://github.com/Srokap/code_review
  • existence of comments?
  • some nice tool for potential problems finder?

See Elgg/community_plugins#34

All of it would serve only informative purposes. I wouldn't want to automatically block plugins, trigger an alert at most.

Some existing tools ideas:

• http://www.sonarsource.com/
• http://sourceforge.net/projects/rips-scanner/
• https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Source_Code_Analysis_Tools

This plugin disables any links to groups/all. For example, when this plugin is activated, I get a white screen after clicking any reference to that URL.

We should ask an approval from the owner of the original post before publishing it as a completely new topic.

Recently I was asked to remove a moved topic completely because the user didn't want his name to be used as the owner of the new topic.

Suggestion:

1. Make the new post private by default
2. Notify the user (See #17 )
   • Tell what has happened and why
   • Ask the user to either publish or remove the post
   • Include a link to the new post

Reasons to flag a post:

• spam
• off topic
• advertising
• duplicate
• low quality
• etc.

Our moderators should be able to do all these things, and they should probably present themselves in a consistent UI.

It may be confusing if a new topic appears out of nowhere with user's own name with it.

This is a really annoying habit that some people have. Warning them by saying, "You should only capitalize the first letter of Elgg," would be a nice nudge. Or else just do this processing for them automatically.

Since we only have 10+ featured groups with quite distinct names, we could perhaps give them their own page handler, i.e. community.elgg.org/feedback-and-planning.

Haven't tested any of the other functionality.