plans preferences

[Anna Carey]

I started working on the rails project again and was looking at the
preferences. I'd like to get rid of the "optional links" preferences.
I think it's silly and old fashioned. I think we can just show all
the links (though perhaps get rid of "broth" and "jumble". Does
anyone care? I think we could also get rid of the "Edit Text Box
Size" preference. It could/should just be handled with css.

Opinions?

[Ian Young]

That *is* sort of a quirky feature, now that you mention it. Let's see, if we drop Jumble and Broth, that leaves us with:

Random Plan
Planwatch
Quicklove
Plan Genesis
Notes
Poll
Home
Secrets
List Users

Plus the non-optional links:

Edit Plan
Search Plans
Preferences
Log Out

That's not a terrible number, but it's more than I would prefer to put in one big list.

Maybe we can drop Home if the new stylesheets standardize on having a clickable logo.

Maybe a simple hierarchy would help. It seems to me like Planwatch, Plan Genesis, List User, and Random Plan could become

Other Plans
--- Recently Updated
--- Recently Created
--- All
--- Random

Notes, Poll, and Secrets all seem vaguely related, too, as "other features".

It seems weird to drop Poll, but I gotta wonder if anyone gets to it by clicking on the nav link, or if all the visits come from the front page posts announcing new polls. (Polls is also kinda abandoned at the moment, maybe we should see if the admins are even interested in keeping it going).

Ian

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[Lindsey Kuper]

On Sat, May 26, 2012 at 8:51 PM, Anna Carey <aca...@gmail.com> wrote:

Do we have any data on what features users use now? If we don't, then
could current users be convinced to do a survey on which features they
really want and which they'd be willing to do away with?

As compelling as it is to start from a clean slate and get rid of all
the dated and crufty crap, we don't want to accidentally get rid of
something that people love and will vocally complain about if it's
gone.

(This isn't in response only to Anna's suggestion, but to various
messages on this list that have discussed getting rid of some feature
or another.)

Lindsey

[Alex Cohn]

Data from production, as of about thirty seconds ago:

mysql> select linkname, count(*) as count from opt_links natural join avail_links group by linknum;

+--------------+-------+

| linkname     | count |

+--------------+-------+

| Random Plan  |  2105 |

| Planwatch    |  2143 |

| Quicklove    |  5031 |

| Plan Genesis |  1446 |

| Notes        |  5266 |

| Poll         |  2659 |

| Home         |  1005 |

| Secrets      |  2913 |

| Jumble       |   258 |

| Broth        |   340 |

| List Users   |  5273 |

+--------------+-------+

Hope this helps.

Alex

[Ian Young]

Lindsey,

AFAIK we have fairly extensive Apache-style access logs from the server, so limited answers about page visits can be had, though it would take some legwork with awk or some sort of logfile analysis tool. And the admins won't want to make the logfiles completely public, for obvious reasons. You should probably ask Ian A for more details if you're interested.

Ian

[Ian Young]

At least we know that killing Jumble and Broth is the right decision :)

FYI, it looks like the optional links that are turned on by default for new users at the moment are: Quicklove, Notes, Polls, List Users. Unsurprisingly, those all have higher usage numbers (except Poll?).

[Lindsey Kuper]

On Sat, May 26, 2012 at 10:53 PM, Alex Cohn <al...@alexcohn.com> wrote:

> Data from production, as of about thirty seconds ago:
> mysql> select linkname, count(*) as count from opt_links natural join
> avail_links group by linknum;

Thanks for the info. It would also be interesting to see not just a
count of users per optional link, but how active those users are (by
some metric -- say, number of updates in the last 30 days). If the
340 Broth users were also the 340 most active users of Plans, I'd
think twice about killing Broth. Not that I think that that
particular scenario is at all likely. :) The point is just that we
should tread very carefully when it comes to removing functionality.

Lindsey

[Alex Cohn]

It's hard to break it down by update frequency - that's not stored in the database. Here are the numbers if we limit it just to users that have updated in the last month; I'll be the first to admit that's not as good a metric, but it is a lot easier to write queries for. If you have any suggestions for better metrics, I'm happy to try them.

mysql> select linkname, count(*) from opt_links natural join avail_links natural join accounts where accounts.changed> now() - interval 1 month group by linknum;

+--------------+----------+

| linkname     | count(*) |

+--------------+----------+

| Random Plan  |      920 |

| Planwatch    |      878 |

| Quicklove    |     1559 |

| Plan Genesis |      580 |

| Notes        |     1418 |

| Poll         |      732 |

| Home         |      492 |

| Secrets      |     1191 |

| Jumble       |      120 |

| Broth        |      168 |

| List Users   |     1468 |

+--------------+----------+

BTW, Broth isn't hosted on the Plans server, just linked to, so it wouldn't be part of any rewrite, right? Also, the server it's on (www.thebroth.com) appears to be down.

Alex

Lindsey