Link EA Profiles

[peterhurford]

The user should be able to go to their account settings and set their EA Profile link (similar to how they can already include a personal link). This should then prominently appear on their account page (i.e., when you click on their name).

[patbl]

Currently you can set a "Personal Link" in your preferences, but I couldn't find out whether that's displayed anywhere. Is it?

[patbl]

It seems to be displayed on LW but not on the EA Forum:

[arichard4]

That whole sidebar is not displayed in the EA forum. You can find the code for it under templates/profilebar.html; the specific lines generating the website link are:

  %if thing.user.pref_url:
    <dt>Website</dt>
    <dd><a href="${thing.user.pref_url}" rel="nofollow">${thing.user.pref_url}</a></dd>
  %endif

Edit: the html that I tried to copy and paste has gotten processed by Github. Meh.

[tog22]

Cool, do you want to try adapting that to start with Alex? I'd strongly
recommend at least starting by just renaming the website link to an EA
Profile link rather than trying to add a new field by this. Great to have
you working on issue #1 - as its name suggests, it's been long delayed!

On 1 July 2015 at 21:36, arichard4 notifications@github.com wrote:

That whole sidebar is not displayed in the EA forum. You can find the code
for it under templates/profilebar.html; the specific lines generating the
website link are:
%if thing.user.pref_url:
Website
${thing.user.pref_url}
%endif

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[tog22]

Sorry for the schizophrenic assigned/unassigned messages. This is a good task for multiple people to work on so it's still great to have your help @patbl !

[arichard4]

Is the idea that this would be in addition to the personal link, or instead of it? The personal link isn't currently being displayed anywhere.

[tog22]

Instead of, at least for now.

[tog22]

(Given that the personal link isn't chosen it seems easiest to at least start by taking advantage of it's already being set up to write to the database, etc. - @peterhurford and I couldn't figure out how to do that when we tried e.g. 34bc808 .)

[arichard4]

Problem: most of the places we would be putting the link to the profile seem to cache their messages, meaning that updates to the profile won't get through to the users for some time. Is this significant/a problem?

[tog22]

It's not a significant problem - let's just live with it at least in v1.

On 6 July 2015 at 02:38, arichard4 notifications@github.com wrote:

Problem: most of the places we would be putting the link to the profile
seem to cache their messages, meaning that updates to the profile won't get
through to the users for some time. Is this significant/a problem?

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[arichard4]

OK, I've pushed to the branch link-to-profile.

[peterhurford]

I made a PR and merged it into our master branch. #19 I'll merge from the branch to Trike soon, but I want to give them a chance to handle their current PRs first.

[arichard4]

Actually, can you hang on and not merge? The top contributors is showing the head icon twice, beside the username and the profile link; I hadn't noticed this before because it didn't update immediately.

[arichard4]

OK, I've fixed that. Would somebody else mind taking a look at this de novo, though? It seems like my system is taking a while to update when I see in my browser when I make a change in a source file. (The user options should only accept a link to an ea profile, i.e. effectivealtruismhub.com/user/something, and then there should be a link to their profile beside their username on posts, comments and meetups immediately, and the sidebar comments and top monthly contributors once the system refreshes.)

[peterhurford]

👍 I can QA this sometime soon.

[tog22]

❤️ to both

[tog22]

It seems like my system is taking a while to update when I see in my browser when I make a change in a source file.

I've found that too.

Would somebody else mind taking a look at this de novo, though?

I just tested your changes and I see all this, except I can't add meetups and can't see top monthly contributors:

The user options should only accept a link to an ea profile, i.e. effectivealtruismhub.com/user/something, and then there should be a link to their profile beside their username on posts, comments and meetups immediately, and the sidebar comments and top monthly contributors once the system refreshes.

[RyanCarey]

Could someone explain what these links to the profiles are to look like? I don't have a monopoly over changes to the forum but it would be good to be told that people are actively starting to integrate the site with another site. Obviously it's the first issue and has been here for a month but would be good to tag me for this sort of thing.

[RyanCarey]

Are we bringing back LW's old right profile sidebar? The higher priority thing from there is the button that you use to message people. Bringing back the profile sidebar in its entirety has the downside of making the ux more complex.

[arichard4]

1. This changes people's names when displayed on the forum (by comments, posts, meetups, recent comments, and top monthly contributors) to also have a link to their EA profile. So e.g. my name would show up as AlexRichard (Profile), if I have manually entered my EA profile's URL. (This issue is still kinda in development- in particular, there's a question of whether to make the link read (Profile) or (EA Profile), and I still need to add the profile link to messages. Neither is really necessary for an initial release, though.)

2. I've already added a button for messaging people- see Make a button on user's page to send a message (LessWrong has a link that does this) #5. The button is on the top link bar of the user page, beside where Overview, Comments, and Submitted are now; the profile sidebar as a whole is not being returned.

[RyanCarey]

Thanks for the reply. Also thanks everyone for all the new awesome features and important fixes implemented since the hackathon!

The button for messaging people sounds ideal!

As for the links to profiles, I can see the instinct to try to bring ea apps together. But might it be excessive to display the link to the profiles next to the name everywhere? When you say it appears next to posts, does it also appear on the frontpage? The more minimal alternative would be to just place a link from the user page e.g. http://effective-altruism.com/user/TopherHallquist/? There's some disadvantages to EA profile integration in general, in that the site has a new dependency (albeit one that might be easily removed). But also the user experience might be worse if the link is featured everywhere: it could be a bit jarring to be moved to a separate site with different design and interface. Also, if you visit the EA Profiles and want to see that individual's writing, presumably the profiles database does not know which forum user page that individual is connected to, correct? Thoughts?

[peterhurford]

I think it makes sense to integrate in other EA services, assuming people like them, since it's the only way they'll get used. I remember talking to you about this a few months ago and you seemed onboard with this at that point, though maybe only as a general principle and of course it's easy to forget. But I don't think there are any sizable risks to "introducing dependencies", generally speaking.

The one concern I agree with is avoiding making the layout ugly. A link on the user page might as well not exist, I feel, since I imagine so few people look there. So I'd want it to be more visible than that. But I'm not sure what layout we're going for here (maybe @arichard4 can provide screenshots?). I agree it would get very ugly for "[click here for profile]" to be next to all the names (the most extreme case), but maybe we could use the cute person icon?

Additionally, maybe we could put something like "Read more about Topher Hallquist at his EA profile" at the end of Topher's posts (and so on for all users)?

I think a lot of us are keen to see this integration and other integrations like it. What do you think?

[arichard4]

@tog22 , comments?

[tog22]

@arichard4 , that basic functionality looks good to me! I don't think there's any more you need to do on it just yet, we can sort out that functionality and then move onto any tweaks, aesthetic or otherwise. Thanks for all your hard work on this, I know a lot of people who've requested and will appreciate it 😃

@RyanCarey , I'm sorry you felt out of the loop! It's easy to forget/get confused about these things, but I've just looked over this and earlier conversations with you, and we'd discussed cross-linking right when you suggested pursuing Hub/Forum synergies when the forum launched, and had been discussing the feature for a while afterwards. You said a few times that you were happy with our submitting our own code for it to Trike (but just couldn't yourself get them to do new features, when they didn't even have capacity to deal with the bug backlog). So that's partly what we've been going on.

Re your question about EA Profile -> EA Forum links, you and I discussed that when we first agreed to cross-link, and I added them, including ones for authors that you sent, though we both decided to make them opt-in - like the EA Forum -> EA Profile links added in these commits. (It's worth bearing in mind that people will be choosing to show a link to their profile when they comment or post, to let readers find out more about them and who they are, so it's reasonable and valuable to give them this choice.)

Leaving aside the aesthetic or other details for now, I hope we can get some sort of consensus on this? 😃

[RyanCarey]

Thanks for the clarifications, and especially the screenshot, which makes it clear what exactly we're talking about. I'm not sure this is positive value as is.

In general, I've been supportive of the forum and profiles (or any other service) connecting to each other, if it's of overall benefit.

My reservation is that putting '(Profile)' next to every name puts it in too many locations:

1. '(Profile)' clutters the sidebar. The sidebar should get readers to posts. Perhaps also user pages. Putting external links there seems like bad UI.
2. If this would make the links appear next to the authors on lists of posts, such as at effective-altruism.com, I don't think they should. The homepage should send people to posts, not to external links. If one is removing it from the homepage, one might similarly want to remove it from lists of posts at /top, /user, etc.
3. Probably the links also shouldn't be through the comments section. Peter might be right that restricting the links just to the user page gives too minimal exposure, but this seems too maximal.

What's tricky is that the external link gives a sudden change of UI with a link-back not always present. Also it only works for users who sign up to both sites and manually enter their username in menus of both sites. Re dependencies, what I was saying is that it's non-ideal that the links all break if EA Profiles goes down or its URLs change.

If you guys are convinced that the feature is important, then I think it would be good to address 1-3. I get that this would be harder than simply adding the profile link to the name wherever this appears.

What do you guys think?

[RyanCarey]

@tog22, I back in September, I had spoke in some generalities:

"[getting people's EA Profiles there to link to their Forum writings] could be cool but the user urls are nonstandard, underscores here and there, different usernames, people would have to enter it themselves"
"re the reverse link, I'm not really implementing new features at the moment. Big codebase and voluntary time from trike make me want to focus on the actual bugs"
"Feel free to prod me if in 1-2 weeks I haven't updated you about Trike's willingness to allow outside contribution to development / opensourcing using github."

Am I confused?

[tog22]

Yep, I was referring primarily to other conversations where we discussed it more specifically in the ways I 😄 I'll try working out ways we can address 1-3 later.

[arichard4]

Another thing: Have some people already entered links to personal websites already? If so, then when we put up a profiles link using the extant pref_url, their profile will then link to their personal website.

[tog22]

Given they're not displayed anywhere we wouldn't lose anything and can't see, but before displaying them (when you check e.g. %if thing.author.pref_url) could you check they match the regexp "(http)?(s?)(:\/\/)?(www.)?effectivealtruismhub\.com\/user\/.*"? If we wanted to add a place where people could display another webpage then you could try adding a pref_other_webpage field, but Peter and I found that really tricky when we tried late last year, and people can already add unlimited links and more to their EA Profiles (e.g.), which seems like the most sensible place for them?

[arichard4]

This look better? (I'm still waiting on the Top Monthly Contributors to refresh, but I removed the the icon from beside each username.)

[RyanCarey]

Smaller, prettier & out of sidebar - nice. You guys can maintain e.g. if
all these new links break, right? Also, good to make sure inputted
addresses are on the EA hub domain as suggested.

You all seem keen so feel free to take it forward. :)

This look better? (I'm still waiting on the Top Monthly Contributors to
refresh, but I removed the the icon from beside each username.)

[image: 2015-07-14-065939_1366x768_scrot]
https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/7397740/8671849/7c5ca624-29f6-11e5-9b4c-9f0d43263915.png

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[tog22]

You guys can maintain e.g. if all these new links break, right?

Yep, I hereby solemnly promise ⭐

You all seem keen so feel free to take it forward. :)

That's great, I'm really glad we managed to achieve consensus! 👬 @peterhurford , I've tested this throroughly and done almost all the work to get ready for a pull request in https://github.com/tog22/eaforum/commits/issue-1-for-pr pending @arichard4 answering some questions on a Facebook message thread.