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Problem/Motivation
On a user profile, there is a tab named "my subscriptions", and another named "track". The difference is not clear, and people told me they were two Drupal modules with different functions. The thing is, in my own user's profile, when they see "track", they just cannot differentiate it from "my subscriptions" (in this context, they just mean the same thing...). This is a usability problem.
Proposed resolution
- The "track" tab should better be named "Contributions" -like in Wikipedia, for example- (possibly, "My contributions", in my own profile, and "User contributions", in other users' public profile, although it is probably more simple to simply call it "Contributions"...).
- Rename track things to: Activity
Remaining tasks
review
User interface changes
Labels and words and paths. See #91
API changes
No.
Comment | File | Size | Author |
---|---|---|---|
#91 | tracker-id.png | 368.59 KB | YesCT |
#91 | tracker.png | 322.64 KB | YesCT |
#91 | user-x-track.png | 383.24 KB | YesCT |
#89 | interdiff.140363.87.88.txt | 355 bytes | YesCT |
#89 | interdiff.85.87.txt | 7.5 KB | YesCT |
Comments
Comment #1
cosmicdreams CreditAttribution: cosmicdreams commentedVery Interesting. I associate "Track" to the module that is doing the tracking (named tracker). So you can see where that name came from.
I agree, though, that naming it something else might be a good idea. What do others think?
Comment #2
elv CreditAttribution: elv commented"My posts" or "My contributions", or "My anything", even "My track" would be better than just "Track" IMHO.
Comment #3
BrightLoudNoise@drupal.org CreditAttribution: BrightLoudNoise@drupal.org commentedHow about "My Activity", or "My Activities"
Comment #4
VM CreditAttribution: VM commentedThe problem with using "My" when looking at another users profile "My" would be incorrect.
Comment #5
cosmicdreams CreditAttribution: cosmicdreams commentedSo the word "My" would have to programmatic. When you are viewing the posts that you have submitted and the activity you've done on the site the tab should read "My Activity". If you're viewing someone else's profile, it should read "'s Activity"
Sound good?
Comment #6
VM CreditAttribution: VM commentedyep, now all that has to be done is a patch created and submitted for Drupal 7
Comment #7
cosmicdreams CreditAttribution: cosmicdreams commentedI meant to say the above. As far as a patch...I'm still setting up my test environment so I can make patches. I'll race ya.
Comment #8
cosmicdreams CreditAttribution: cosmicdreams commentedComment #9
Sutharsan CreditAttribution: Sutharsan commentedMoving issues from User experience project to Drupal core usability component.
Comment #10
Xano"Contributions" would indicate users actually write valuable content for a website or anything like that IMHO. "Track" or "activity" would be better, since it only describes that the user is active on the site, but it doesn't give any implications on what exactly thet user might be doing. I think those words have a more general meaning.
Personally I like "track" better, but considering simplicity and translations I'd go for "activity", since that's a more general word in most languages.
Comment #11
cosmicdreams CreditAttribution: cosmicdreams commentedXano: I understand your point of the use of the term Contributions. That makes good sense to me.
However, I think the use of the term Activity to describe the content creation events of adding nodes and comments make more sense today than when we first discussed this issue. Many people can easily relate to Facebook's Activity Feed as an analogy for a list of things that a person is generates on a site. So I'd like to advocate for the change of the term "Track" to "Activity" again.
A change to something as long lived as tracker would have to be discussed further though. This is a change that might be welcomed by some, but I don't think this issue has seen enough eyeballs to enact yet.
This change is likely to be a very simple one so I think there is still time to get this into Drupal 7. I'll tag with the Novice term.
Comment #12
cosmicdreams CreditAttribution: cosmicdreams commented@Jao: If you don't have any strong objections, I'll re-title this issue to reflect the naming that seems to have the most traction in the above comments.
Comment #13
yoroy CreditAttribution: yoroy commentedYes, would be nice. Simple first version of a patch attached.
Comment #14
cosmicdreams CreditAttribution: cosmicdreams commentedI'll put this in my testing queue today.
Comment #15
cosmicdreams CreditAttribution: cosmicdreams commentedAfter I cleared my cache on /admin/config/development/performance it worked for me.
Comment #16
Dries CreditAttribution: Dries commentedI support this change but when we rename the label, we should also update the URL path. The URL should become
user/$uid/activity
.Comment #17
yoroy CreditAttribution: yoroy commentedDries: changing %user to %uid is intended or a typo?
This one uses %uid
Comment #18
yoroy CreditAttribution: yoroy commentedstatus for bot
Comment #20
yoroy CreditAttribution: yoroy commentedYes, it broke a test, as it should.
Comment #21
cosmicdreams CreditAttribution: cosmicdreams commentedLooking forward to seeing this issue go green. yoroy, that is a very intuitive improvement. Do other parts of tracker need to be changed do to the path change?
Comment #22
yoroy CreditAttribution: yoroy commentedThe breaking tests usually point out the paths that get broken, so we'll wait and see. A final stress test by a human never hurts of course but is not neccessary before test bot is happy
Comment #23
cosmicdreams CreditAttribution: cosmicdreams commented@yoroy: After applying the patch and flushing drupal's cache this patch seems to break tracker.
Comment #24
NaheemSays CreditAttribution: NaheemSays commentedShould it not be "Activity" instead of "My activity"?
(or if My is used, then for other users it should use the users name.)
Is there also a need to make similar changes for the tracker and tracker/%uid pages?
Comment #26
cosmicdreams CreditAttribution: cosmicdreams commented@nbz: good point, use of the term "My Activity" will be confusing for some, since a possible interpretation of the tab name would be, "My relative interaction with that person or if that person is me, my interaction with throughout the site."
Let's see if the addition of this complexity does not put this patch out of scope for drupal 7.
Comment #27
corbacho CreditAttribution: corbacho commentedI wouldn't call it "My Activity". It's infantilizing. It reminds to Windows 95 with "My Computer" or "My Yahoo", MySpace. Even Microsoft has stop using it. In Windows 7 is now only "Computer"
Who uses "your" ?
Flickr, Amazon, and others uses "Your account", Twitter uses "your tweets" or "Account"
From what I saw Facebook don't use any possessives, only nouns "Account, Photos,..."
I will go for "Your activity", or only "Activity".
Also interesting to read: My Vs Your http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/social/core/yourvmy.html
We should be consistent too... I made a search in all the code of Drupal core and there are lots of strings where Drupal uses "your". For example "your language", "your content", "your database", "your email", "your comment". But in the other hand I found "My" in "My account" and "My blog".
This should be decided soon, before interface strings are frozen.
Re-rolling patch
Comment #28
corbacho CreditAttribution: corbacho commentedI forgot the screenshots. (Should we add a weight, so "Activity" is in the last tab?)
The "/tracker" path also displays "All recent content" and "My recent content". Should be also modified, how? drupal.org/tracker has "all recent posts" instead of "content"
Comment #29
bojanz CreditAttribution: bojanz commentedComment #30
yoroy CreditAttribution: yoroy commentedThanks for looking into this, but strings have been frozen for a long time already. Yes, this is Drupal 8 material.
Comment #31
XanoConsistency++, but not if it's unclear whose content the system is talking about. Yours or theirs?
Comment #32
dbeall CreditAttribution: dbeall commentedNice to see this addressed, I have been hacking core with every update to read 'my contributions'.
Comment #33
webchickI'm not sure why you would hack core for this. Use http://drupal.org/project/stringoverrides.
Comment #34
dbeall CreditAttribution: dbeall commentedsorry about my bad habits, I do use stringoverrides as well and it works on most drupal text.
I promise to never hack D7 or D8 core
I promise to never hack D7 or D8 core
I promise to never hack D7 or D8 core
I promise to never hack D7 or D8 core
+100, lol
Comment #35
webchickHa. :D
Comment #36
Niklas Fiekas CreditAttribution: Niklas Fiekas commentedNeeds a reroll because of the directory structure changes.
Comment #37
Schnitzel CreditAttribution: Schnitzel commentedreroll
Comment #38
Niklas Fiekas CreditAttribution: Niklas Fiekas commentedExcellent. One more thing: hook_help() mentions the existence of a Track tab.
Comment #39
synth3tk CreditAttribution: synth3tk commentedMy first attempt at a patch. Ever! Changed the hook_help() reference to Activity.
Also, I agree with #18 (change the URL of the tab), although I didn't change that in this patch.
Comment #41
synth3tk CreditAttribution: synth3tk commentedHuh. Now I see why people like *nix. I'm also not sure why it created a huge patch. My bad.
Comment #42
synth3tk CreditAttribution: synth3tk commentedLet's have another go at it.
Comment #44
synth3tk CreditAttribution: synth3tk commentedAnd again....
Comment #46
synth3tk CreditAttribution: synth3tk commentedOk, using a different approach to create it. Sorry for spamming up the issue! I'm what you call a "hands-on" learner.
Comment #48
synth3tk CreditAttribution: synth3tk commentedI guess I'll just use the CLI for patches from now on. Sorry for the spam.
Comment #49
Niklas Fiekas CreditAttribution: Niklas Fiekas commentedCombined the two patches.
I'd vote for keeping the URL. It's not misleasing, we have another URL like that and afterall the module is called tracker. (And a contrib project activity exists.)
Comment #50
Devin Carlson CreditAttribution: Devin Carlson commentedThe patch in #49 applies cleanly and changes the confusing "track" text to "activity" (which a majority of people have suggested).
Comment #51
XanoComment #52
webchickIt doesn't look like #16 was done? The path hasn't changed.
Comment #53
Niklas Fiekas CreditAttribution: Niklas Fiekas commentedI have argued against that, but not sure if there is a consensus (so needs review):
Comment #54
oriol_e9gI'm for "Activity" but we still need to change the path:
$items['user/%user/track']
should be:$items['user/%user/activity']
Comment #55
oriol_e9gOps! Sorry, I hadn't read that there was no consensus with the new path.
Comment #56
webchickIf the only reason not to rename it is the module is called "Tracker" that doesn't really make sense to me. We should name user-facing elements (menu items, tabs, URLs) according to what makes sense to users. And while Activity module exists, it does not, as far as I can tell, claim this path. And even if it does, Activity module is used as an alternative to Tracker, not alongside it.
Comment #57
synth3tk CreditAttribution: synth3tk commentedWell if the Activity module doesn't claim the URL, and we're already changing the strings to "Activity", then I really don't see why we shouldn't. It helps to keep everything consistent.
Comment #58
Niklas Fiekas CreditAttribution: Niklas Fiekas commentedYep. I see the point. Webchick also made this point (as an example): system module exposes admin/modules not admin/system/modules because it makes more sense to the user.
What about the side wide tracker and tracker/all pages?
Comment #59
dbeall CreditAttribution: dbeall commentedIn my beginners opinion,,
The label changes depending on the site and the type of
people, sorry for the D7 word, the 'Users' of the site..On a community web site, I named it 'My Contributions'
It's easy enough to hack that one little thing....
Comment #60
dbeall CreditAttribution: dbeall commentedI just have one thought to stick in the works.. don't pay attention to my idea too much because i'm a detail nut and site builder, but not a programmer. It's all about the user interface to me, I let Drupal do what it wants to do.
The tracker tab is the shoe-box full of posts by that user.
In my Drupal Deams, I see a configure link on the module list page next to tracker module.
I click the configure link and I can magically give that tab what ever name I want my users to see.
Comment #61
dbeall CreditAttribution: dbeall commentedIt just hit me, because I just hacked this again -- sorry, i had 4 people wanting sites last week and it came up again.
just today, I renamed the tracker tab by hacking core to make it read "My Content"
I named it that because I was going through the moves that the user would,,
The web site had a link that offered me to "add new content", or something like that...
I made some new content, and logged out.
I logged back in and see my account page,, and now i see "My Content"
I was active in many ways on many occasions on the web site,,, but didn't add any new content... but now that I have added new content, It shows in My Content List...
hmmmmmmm
do you see why i don't get involved in this stuff....
Comment #62
Kristen PolRegarding #58, if we are going with "activity" in the URL in one place then, IMHO, it makes sense to be consistent and change it for the other URLs as well. Meaning, any URLs and user-facing strings would use "activity" whereas internally "tracker" can still be used (e.g. module name, filenames, etc.).
Comment #63
krishworks CreditAttribution: krishworks commentedTrackers only tracks the posted content or comment on the website and it may not be appropriate to call it 'activity'. Term 'Activity' denotes a variety of actions like 'logged in, logged out, posted content, liked someone's post, shared content; etc. I understand liking and sharing are not part of drupal core and could be handled by contribs. However, if tracker doesn't allow contrib modules to add other entries to its stream, then it's better we rename it to something else other than 'Activity' or just leave it as Tracker.
Also, if we are going to use 'activity' in urls and ui, then it also makes sense to change the module name to activity, rather than tracker. Otherwise, it's still a confusion to use all file names and functions starting with 'tracker'.
Comment #64
rivimeyNot sure what can be added here but this issue should be resolved and closed out. So far it's lasted rather a long time.
Activity for the tab name seems to have consensus.
URL path change seems to make sense too.
Lets not add in features under this issue report, so if it is appropriate to add in aln All Activity page then add a new issue for that.
If the above can't be agreed, perhaps we can decide that it doesn't matter enough to change?
Comment #65
klonos...two related issues I've filed against d.o customizations #2101961: Do not include issues in the query that creates the "Posts"/"Your posts" tabs. / #1139664: List the date the user has last replied/posted in the users' profile/details (instead of the date the post was last updated)
PS: I also don't like the word "track" (implies some sort of spying) - I prefer "activity" more since it implies involvement/participation or frequency when the time factor is taken under account.
Comment #66
BryanGullan CreditAttribution: BryanGullan commentedI'd agree with @rivimey on this (#64). Seems to be that we should have the following changes:
I've attached a patch for this. I would suggest that further consideration of the title used for the user/$uid/activity page may be appropriate, but how about leaving that for a separate issue as a follow-up, if all else is fine with this patch?
Comment #68
BryanGullan CreditAttribution: BryanGullan commentedAh, damn. The tests contain paths and need to be updated. Will re-roll that patch to include test updates.
Comment #69
BryanGullan CreditAttribution: BryanGullan commentedRe-rolled patch with updates to the tests.
Comment #71
BryanGullan CreditAttribution: BryanGullan commentedOops, missed a couple. Also update a couple of comments to be accurate with respect to references to paths.
Comment #72
BryanGullan CreditAttribution: BryanGullan commentedComment #73
dags CreditAttribution: dags commentedThe patch applies and looks good but we can't RTBC it just yet because of this issue: #2120877: Add tests for tracker module's Tools menu link.
Comment #74
BryanGullan CreditAttribution: BryanGullan commentedI'll see if I can get a patch together to sort out #2120877 then :-)
That one will need to retain the "Tracker" label, and then I can update this patch to apply Activity as a label anywhere it's needed.
In the meantime, I've attached an updated patch to include a fix to the link within the Help screen for Tracker.
Comment #75
dags CreditAttribution: dags commentedCould you attach an interdiff? I can't tell what's different between #71 and #74.
Comment #76
BryanGullan CreditAttribution: BryanGullan commentedNot an actual patch file, but it's just a change to line 25 of tracker.module:
Comment #77
klonosComment #78
klonosComment #79
realityloopI don't know that an interdif is very useful given it's 9 months since the last patch, but here is a patch that makes this change and the Tracker tests pass with the changes made.
Comment #80
larowlanLooks good.
Any reason /tracker and /tracker/{uid} weren't updated too?
Comment #81
rivimey@larowlan, in the spirit of my comment in #64 and given that there would be multiple issues relating to URL renaming, I think it's better to go with #79 than extend this patch to cover that. Feel free to add in a new issue if you feel that url renaming is important.
Comment #82
heddnI've reviewed the code. It looks solid. Let's get this in and add additional paths in follow-on issues.
Comment #83
alexpottComment #84
YesCT CreditAttribution: YesCT commentedreroll. for #697760: Replace getInfo() in tests with native phpDoc + annotations (following PHPUnit)
new patch also coming in a couple minutes.
Comment #85
YesCT CreditAttribution: YesCT commentedsorry. patch.
Comment #86
YesCT CreditAttribution: YesCT commentedI was going to update the class one line summary, since that was the change in the getInfo that was effected.
But, the patch the way it is, does still provide /tracker (and not /activity)
So that change to the description in getinfo (now would just be on the doc block for the class) is not appropriate.
I'm not sure what to do about /tracker and /tracker/{uid}
what do they do different than /user/{uid}/activity ?
As user 1, I can access /user/2/activity
but not /tracker/2
/tracker seems to be "Recent content"
and
/tracker/1 is "My recent content"
Is there a separate issue to deal with /tracker?
I think we need one, or it needs to be in here.
Let's *think* a bit more.
Comment #87
realityloop/tracker is global activity, now renamed to /activity
/tracker/[uid] only accesible if using your own UID, now renamed to /activity/[uid]
-page title is "My recent content" and the link is accesible by local tab when at /activity
-this is different to /user/[uid]/tracker which is accesible to all users with sufficient permissions
Comment #88
realityloopSmall update to also change the friendly name of the module to "Activity Tracker"
Comment #89
YesCT CreditAttribution: YesCT commentedI might have made these interdiffs right.
There was an automatic 3 way merge in there somewhere while rebasing. but no conflict.
Comment #90
YesCT CreditAttribution: YesCT commentedComment #91
YesCT CreditAttribution: YesCT commentedthings to check:
/user/1/track
/track
/track/1
looks like head broke and the link is not a link for the title....
not to do with this issue though.
looks good to me. seems head has the problem of the title not being the link, and not the problem of this issue/patch in 88
Comment #92
YesCT CreditAttribution: YesCT commentedmaybe we need a new issue that would be a child of #2297711: Fix HTML escaping due to Twig autoescape
... not sure. but it is related.
Comment #93
YesCT CreditAttribution: YesCT commentedComment #94
YesCT CreditAttribution: YesCT commentedRe-read the whole patch. looks good, stays within scope.
tried it manually earlier.
and the autoescape thing will be handled by the other issue.
Comment #95
alexpottI think that changing the url means we should have a change record.
Comment #96
realityloopChange record created at https://www.drupal.org/node/2306927
Comment #97
YesCT CreditAttribution: YesCT commentedgood start. I made the title of the change record more specific.
I also searched for other change records with "tracker" in them, to see if there were any change records we might need to update.
https://www.drupal.org/list-changes/published?keywords_description=track...
and found
https://www.drupal.org/node/2086767
New History JS API — history markers no longer break the render cache
Maybe this could use an edit since we are changing the name of the module from Tracker to Activity Tracker? (but the machine name of the module is still tracker. so I dont know)
https://www.drupal.org/node/1543796
Namespace and naming changes for test classes of automated tests
I didnt see anything there that needed changed.
Comment #99
realityloophttps://www.drupal.org/node/2086767
references https://www.drupal.org/node/2082315 with a patch (currently needs work) that will need to change if this issue makes it in, I'm happy to jump onto that queue once this one makes it in.
https://www.drupal.org/node/1543796
no changes need to be made here as far as I can tell
Comment #100
YesCT CreditAttribution: YesCT commentedok. change records dealt with. and still green. rtbc.
Comment #102
alexpottCommitted 022163f and pushed to 8.0.x. Thanks!
Comment #103
YesCT CreditAttribution: YesCT commentedthanks!