Loomio
Fri 3 Oct 2014 4:43AM

"Top Twenty Tags" section in left sidebar

D Daniel Public Seen by 133

I am a new podmin and I've noticed the left sidebar is a little redundant and underutilized. The My Activity and Stream buttons are duplicated no more than 2 inches from each other on the stream page, so I removed them from the left side.

Under this, I added a "Top Twenty Tags" section. When new users join my pod, they quickly fall off because no one interacts with them. This gives them a well-rounded popular list that they will be bound to meet someone that shares interests with them. I've found new users are actively using the tags suggested here and there is much more interaction.

To generate this, I tried to edit the Ruby controller files but had no idea what I was doing. I think it should be similar to the following code used for the Admin page:

def stats
@popular_tags = ActsAsTaggableOn::Tagging.joins(:tag).limit(50).count(:group => :tag, :order => 'count(taggings.id) DESC')

but didn't know how to link it to the .haml files (if that's even what you do). For now, I just updated the en.yml and main.stream.html.haml file to manually type in each as a link. I kinda like being able to manually define this so I can shape it to what I see my community posting about so maybe this should instead turn into a parameter to add in a config file. Just a thought.

DU

Rich Fri 3 Oct 2014 7:08AM

Cool idea!

'Trending tags' would be even cooler :)

Can we see this in action somewhere??

CK

Christos Koulaxizis Fri 3 Oct 2014 8:02AM

That's a great idea!

We could also add on the left sidebar links to the "Like Stream" (https://diasp.eu/liked) and "Commented Posts" (https://diasp.eu/commented) - Seen on http://diaspora.net.gr

TR

[email protected] Fri 3 Oct 2014 12:03PM

Sounds like a good idea, the idea and how tags work at first was a bit confusing, some examples of what's trending might be good use of some of the empty space.

D

Daniel Fri 3 Oct 2014 2:29PM

Thanks for the comments, guys. If you want to check out my basic "template" of what I think this should be...sign up for an account at shrekislove.us and check out what I got so far.

TE

Thaddaeus Edwards Fri 3 Oct 2014 7:19PM

Great idea! I'm new to Diaspora and have not found much activity to engage with. A list of popular tags would be really useful to guide new users but also informative for regular users.

DU

Fri 3 Oct 2014 7:29PM

We discussed it one or two times ;)
Here is my position. I'm strongly against all kind of popular generated content. ;)

D

Daniel Fri 3 Oct 2014 8:09PM

Interesting take, Augier. I feel that each pod should have a common theme to it so the people that are on them can directly interact (community spotlight members) and have common interests breeding conversation. It's also a good list to look at quick as a newbie and, if the pod isn't talking about things that interest you...find another without having to experiment and waste time to ultimately find out it was the wrong pod to be a part of in the first place. I would like a certain theme to my pod and if that doesn't work for someone, then they can create their own pod and host the tags and themes they want. I think that's what can help group "like" people together and make this network grow.

DU

Sat 4 Oct 2014 9:05AM

Still, I'm strongly against. My feel is that these kind of suggestion tends to uniformize the subjects of interrest rather than to encorage the discovering.

Moreover, I think it encourages the "hot-discussions" reactions, based on momentaneous emotions rather than calm and open-minded discussions.

To me, it is more or less like the Facebook system to display "popular articles". It's unhealthy to me.

G

goob Sat 4 Oct 2014 12:11PM

Like Augier, I dislike all kinds of 'trending' features like this, and have no interest in such data. However, it is not something I strongly believe must not be made part of Diaspora, and so as there seems to be a lot of support for this, and potentially a usefulness for the network, I don't mind it being implemented.

I think it would be good, however, to make it an optional feature, so that those who are interested in 'hot' tags can see them displayed, while the rest of us won't find this information intruding into our Diaspora experience.

Daniel, the way the network works, it should not matter a bit what other people on the same pod as you are interested in or talking about - you can find people from across the network who share the same interests as you. There is no need to move your home pod in order to talk with people on other pods.

Sure, some podmins might want to create a pod for a particular locality or interest group, and that's fine, but in general, people can have their data on any open pod and still communicate with like-minded people from across all pods.

D

Daniel Sat 4 Oct 2014 3:32PM

+1 to Goob here, I think the option to turn this on and off would be perfect. I was looking at this more from the perspective of a new user so I'm guessing established users wouldn't care to see this anymore. I think that would work perfect.

And Goob, I understand that anyone can share with anyone else and that's fantastic. I'm just concerned about my newbies that dont have a medium to find these other "like" people and I was hoping to promote this. Once they can find these people that share their interests, then they wont need this Top Twenty Tags anymore and they are now established...another good reason to have it so you can turn this feature on and off. Thanks for the idea on that man!

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