Add lastActivityDate to UI to make newest sort functionality more obvious

[popzip]

Currently, sorting by 'newest' is driven by the requirements:

User must also be able to sort by recency. The date of the most recent question or answer should drive recency. The date of comments should not impact recency.

However the UI for the browse/search results page displays creationDate for the question. You cannot actually see the lastActivityDate in the UI, so it's not so obvious that the sorting is working.

Consider adding lastActivityDate to the UI to make that more obvious.

[popzip]

Considerations (Kasey and Mitch to continue thinking):

• Search comment text but don't use its date
• Show date of question but not answer
• Answer can drive sorting
• Accepting an answer updates activity date
• Voting does not impact activity date
• We import Stack Overflow's last activity date (although may adhere to different rules than ours)
• How can we show to user (and verify/test ourselves) that sort works?
• Probably need to indicate both dates in compact way (asked and last activity date)

[yawitz]

Wanted to post the notes from the conversation Kasey and I had earlier.

Note that I'm not 100% clear on what actions update the lastActivity time. If Kasey is correct (her list above), then I'm surprised that voting does not update the activity date, but accepting an answer does. (Although maybe that's OK from a UX perspective, since earning approval of an answer can be considered more meaningful than someone voting on it.) If we have the option of "accepting" not affecting activity time, though, the proposal below might work better (since the challenge of showing the userName of the accepter would go away--we'd only show user names of Q or A submitters).

In any case, here are the notes:

---

• Options:
  • If a question has no answers yet, show "asked" date and asker display name.
  • If the question has been answered, show most recent answer date and that answerer's display name.
  • BUT: accepting an answer also updates QnA Doc date. What to show then?
• Proposed wording:
  • "asked by " if no answers yet.
  • "updated by " if there are answers. (Use date of most recent answer.)
  • If an "accept" action modifies most recent activity date, we'd need to show the accepter's name.
  • If we can't do that, then can we instead not have "accept" actions modify the activity date?
  • (Would that even be the right thing to do?)

[popzip]

Note also discrepancy in terminology between: Sort for 'Newest' (as termed in UI) that returns results ordered by lastActivity date (which is impacted by Q and/or A date). Returns results at the URL: "localhost:3000/?sort=active"

May want to consider having consistent UI/code terminology since its a teaching tool and want to show the link. It might make sense to change the UI to have the sort tab read "activity" since we're driving the sort based on activity date.

For example, in the instance that a teaching exercise has the developer create a new sort by 'oldest first', we would need them to easily trace the tabs in the UI to the underlying functions.

[grechaw]

While I was working on relevance scoring I really was itching for the same thing with "score". Can we generalize this RFE into 'diagnostic data' which would be super nice for the developer to see in the UI? score and lastActivityDate fit into this category.

[popzip]

It might make sense to expand this issue to encompass other language-y things. Not sure I understand on score though - where would you have wanted/expected to see it in the UI? to explicitly sort by "Relevance Score"?

[grechaw]

Yes, that's right. The Search API returns something called "score" which is how relevance ranking is done. As I've been working #572 I've been changing the scoring; it would be superb to see the score in the app as I update the search options.

In other words the UI does the relevance ordering, I just would like to see the score behind it.

[popzip]

Ahh ok. I think its distinct from this issue then. Does it make more sense to add to #572 or create a new one?

[yawitz]

We're talking about two different things here:

• Kasey is talking about in-product language
• Charles is talking about some way to make some of the currently-not-displayed information visible.

I can see, and support, the idea of a "diagnostic" display or mode of some kind that shows various interesting data that's not currently shown in the UI. Seems like a reasonable RFE to support the training goals of this project.

I'm not, in general, in favor of having the in-product UI language driven by the language choices made in the code, especially since one of our goals is to demonstrate good UI practice (separate from implementation choices). I might be convinced of a change in the specific instance Kasey named, but would like to have a broader discussion on this topic before we start hacking away at the current UI language choices.

[laurelnaiad]

Chris L. was adamant that we not conflate "vote count" with "score" (as we were doing in an earlier UI), due to the fact that this is a teaching tool, and "score" has a very specific meaning in MarkLogic searches that we don't want to confuse.... so that is one not-very-negotiable aspect of the in-application language.

[popzip]

@laurelnaiad right. As @yawitz pointed out, @grechaw is proposing to SHOW the score, not necessarily about language for saying score. And if he did, it would be for the specific MarkLogic score usage not vote count (as we originally - erroneously - used the word score).

[popzip]

Added https://github.com/marklogic/marklogic-samplestack/issues/605 for Charles' proposal.