User journal
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Does a user journal plugin exist anywhere?
Everyone would have one thread for themselves.
It would be pre-created by default.
Others could view it but not post in it. (maybe an option to make it private on a per-user basis)
Surprised this doesn't exist, I've looked into different options around this a few times.
(posted this in the wrong place previously)
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@eeeee topics are inherently useful because they have freeform content ordered by date, so there can be a lot of use cases here. If the topic is only writeable by that user but viewable by anyone (or private), it can be used to share anything time bound, like a journal, blog posts, progress in a goal, etc.
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Theoretically doable building on existing core concepts...
A plugin (or admin, I guess) would need to create a hidden category, and the plugin would associate any created topics with the user in a separate sorted set.
I do something similar already with the ActivityPub integration, where remote content is saved into a new category, but each individual user sees a subset of those topics based on their follow relationships, etc.
It's an interesting idea, but we didn't pursue it because forums with blog support tended to be an older idea that declined in popularity due to ease of hosting things like WordPress, etc.
Maybe it's time they come back?
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@julian thanks for that background.
I'm not sure "blog" would be the ideal way to frame this since that's commonly understood as something more like substack or lifestyle recipe sites, typically articles and pages.
Maybe a nodebb differentiation or at least the use case I'm describing is more like a time-ordered scratchpad or journal, where entries can be one sentence, or just photos, or daily updates, or really anything depending on the purpose of the parental forum. Users can then scrub up and down through their progress. You guys have done all the hard work with the infrastructure/ UI already, this seems like a small tweak to extract an entirely new use case on the same foundation.
I'm thinking users would have a section on their own profile to access their topic, and likewise for finding other user's journals.
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@o-o You might want to have a look at this
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Thanks @phenomlab, trying to figure out how that works, it seems like an internal link organizer? Will look into it more.
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@o-o your post got me thinking a bit about just exactly how this would look without NodeBB having to become a Twitter/X clone
I think the idea behind a user journal is that it doesn't necessarily fit within the pre-defined categories in the forum, so you post it in your own personal bucket of... stuff?
I wonder if then the
/worldcategory would be something approaching that use-case... under the hood,/worldis actually cid-1, which I liken to sort of an "Uncategorized" category. One could theoretically just post all their random stuff there, and you'd really only be building a filter to view your own topics, if you wanted to view your journal, per se... -
Thanks @phenomlab
@julian said in User journal:
I think the idea behind a user journal is that it doesn't necessarily fit within the pre-defined categories in the forum, so you post it in your own personal bucket of... stuff?
I think that's right, imagine a health forum that wanted to give someone a journal space to track their progress with notes and photos. Or house remodeling. Or your works in an art school. Or anything else time bound or progress oriented. In these cases, I would expect: 1. at least one canonical thread for each user that was discoverable in their profile, 2. they have control over visibility, 3. they are the only one posting content there, by default.
This use case is also interesting to me because I don't think most other products are doing a good job at it, and nodebb already has all of the UX/I to do this well.
I guess the other way to do this would be to have one topic per entry, which might be better with use cases like allowing others to comment on every entry?
