More Gallery Improvements: Portfolios and Featured topics

Continuing the discussion from Gallery Improvements:

Following some feedback we received on the new, more visual gallery, @david24 and the good folks at Discourse have added a feature and made some refinements. First, the new feature:

Portfolio

Topics posted in the Gallery category now appear in your user Portfolio. I’m going to single-out @theoutside here:

Screen Shot 2020-06-09 at 10.30.48 AM

A link to your portfolio appears on your user card. Here’s @BrianJ 's card:

If you want to add to your Portfolio, add a topic with your image to the Gallery category. It’s that simple.

Now, the refinements…

Featured Gallery Widget

Based on this feedback, the content of the Featured Gallery Topics widget:

is now a random selection of the “top” topics from the past year. Top topics are those with the most likes and replies.

And yes, we are still working to allow for suppression of the widget itself. More on that later. And it’s now possible to hide the Featured Topics widget.

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Hi @dan,

A little disquiet has been seen in the forum recently about the selection process for portfolio entries. While this is discussed it would be helpful to know what the current rules are. In the following I will use the term scrape for the process of getting an image from the gallery to the Portfolio. This may not be the correct term for the process, but that does not matter in this context.

Please could you:

  1. Confirm that the first image in the first post in a thread tagged with Gallery will be the one that is scraped into the Portfolio.
  2. Confirm that if there is no image in the first post, nothing will be scraped into the Portfolio.
  3. Advise whether after an image has been scraped, editing the post it came from so that the first image in it is changed (either by replacement or prior insertion) will cause the new image to: replace the image in the Portfolio; or: add the new image to the Portfolio without removing the old one; or: have no effect on the Portfolio.
  4. Advise whether deleting an image that has been scraped will also delete that image from the Portfolio and, if so, whether a subsequent image in that post will replace it in the Portfolio.
  5. Advise whether deleting from the thread a post containing a scraped image will: leave the image in the Portfolio; or: delete the image from the Portfolio with no replacement; or: replace the image in the Portfolio with the first image in the next post, should one exist.
  6. Advise whether images in the Portfolio remain there, subject to your answers to the above, in perpetuity or for a set time.
  7. Advise whether adding a Gallery tag to an old thread previously without it will trigger scraping to the Portfolio.
  8. Advise whether removing a Gallery tag from a thread that has been scraped to the Portfolio will remove the scraped image from the Portfolio.

TIA
Jeremy

Hi Jeremy-

First, let me apologize for the delayed reply. I was on holiday basically starting the day you posted this and I’ve been working to catch up from a backlog.

“scape” is good a term as any :slight_smile: It’s not exactly what is happening, but yes, let’s go with that.

While we’re on the topic of terminology, I think it’s important to distinguish between tags and categories. In your list, you refer to the Gallery tag…that’s not correct. The Gallery is a category; not a tag. I hope that makes sense and I’ll answer based on categories, rather than tags…

First, I’ll talk about intended behavior…there are probably bugs and I’ve not tested all conditions recently, so just keep that in mind.

Correct. Topics posted in the Gallery category are added to the users Portfolio. Yes, the first image is thumbnail in the Portfolio, though the link just leads back to the Gallery topic post.

Not quite. If the user creates a topic in the Gallery without an image, there is no thumbnail in the Portfolio. Here is an example of that less-than-ideal situation.

If you edit the first image of your pre-existing topic in the Gallery, the thumbnail updates in the Portfolio.

If you delete the images from your Gallery topic, the thumbnail in your Portfolio will look like this:
Screenshot 2023-01-27 at 11.51.17 AM

because Discourse’s Gallery/Portfolio plugin cannot find an image to “scrape.”

Deleting a topic will cause the entire topic link (thumbnail and all) to disappear from your Portfolio. Hopefully, by now, it should be clear that ONLY the first post (that of the user) is “scaped” for the Porfolio.

Yes, they remain there until the topic is deleted. There is no time-limit.

Again, tags have nothing to with it. I think what you are alluding to here is the less-than-ideal situation - perhaps a bug we need to address - where someone else moves a topic from a non-Gallery category into the Gallery category. My expectation is that this would add this topic’s first post to the user’s Portfolio - I doubt Discourse is yet smart enough to distinguish the intention here. I can see how this is problem.

(Same caveat regarding the irrelevance of tags). We should test this one. I suspect that moving a Gallery category topic to any other category should remove the topic from the user’s Portfolio. I will try it and report back. UPDATE: Yes, that is how it works.

Does this add any clarity?

Stepping back, the one take-away I have from this “disquiet” (good choice of term!) is that having another user (probably an admin) move a topic into the Gallery is problematic from the Portfolio perspective. We need to make sure users know that they should ONLY add THEIR work to the Gallery…and only work they have permission to share (some work is done for hire and the client may not want such work posted publicly).

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Hi @dan,

Thank you for your comprehensive and clear response. I think that the answers you have given should help people to work the system in such a way as to mitigate any concerns they have, pending any future changes in functionality.

Regards
Jeremy

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