Remove bookmark entries from the river on Community

Users tend to use the Bookmarks feature here as a wishlist for plugins or a way of saving threads. It easily floods the river with information that isn't useful for anyone but the user saving the bookmarks. Any objections to blocking bookmarks from being added to the river in our community mods plugin?

  • we should change core to either disable bookmark river entries by default or make them private

    I agree with Juho that I don't think we can make this change for core because it's about use cases. IMHO, the standard use case for bookmarks is to share content with the community and allow discussion about that content. Here, a different use case emerged and it's more river sludge than conversation starting because they're almost exclusively linking internally.

    I've been wanting a way to allow users to self-supress different content that appears in their rivers. Whether it's an overzelous friend who floods it with posts, or specific kinds of items they only want to see once it passes a certain threshold (eg, bookmarks with several likes or comments).

    Our system isn't sophisticated enough yet for something like this, unfortunately.

  • +2

    I have created Pull request on github if you want to remove you can merge request.

    https://github.com/Elgg/community_customizations/pull/9

  • I think "different use cases" is the point.

    From my experience (from my site) people use the bookmarks almost exclusively to bookmark internal pages (for themselves but don't set the entry to private) while they post links to external sites they want to share with others in wire postings.

    The impression I get from the usage of bookmarks on the community site is:

    • used as "I want to remember this page" functionality (average number of bookmarks),
    • self-promotion of sites (very rarely - and even if not intended as spam it's still not allowed as far as I understand the terms),
    • spam (the vast majority of bookmarks).

    The question is how to avoid unwanted river entries. Easiest solution would be to make all bookmarks private (exclusive access level) or not adding any river entries at all. But this would make the bookmarks plugin rather obsolete in terms of its basic functionality of sharing links.

    Maybe pre-selection of "private" access level would already decrease the unwanted "remember" bookmarks for personal use only as I think most people are simply too lazy to change the access level at all. Or it could help to not add a river entry for links to internal pages (maybe optional as plugin setting to consider different use cases).

    The main problem of spam bookmarks remains though if there bookmarks aren't private exclusively. But I don't think making all bookmarks private would be a good way to solve the spam problem.

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