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Improve Feed search filters to hide "minor activities"
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Description

Preamble

If you visit the page /feed/ you see some basic filters:

Screenshot of Phabricator /feed/ advanced filters (382×721 px, 34 KB)

These filters are useful to discover or remember what was done on a certain day and populate "intervention reports" - something very common in any company where every employee have to enter into a legacy management system how they invested their working hours (e.g. this monday I've spent 2 hours on this project, 1 hours for that customer, etc.).

Fortunately, filling intervention reports is simple thanks to this Feed history.

Problem

There is no simple way to suppress some "minor activities" and this slows down daily summary operations by employees.

Proposed solution

In the /feed/ advanced search, add a checkbox:

  • Hide minor activities

When checked, as default it should hide these activities:

  • move a Task from a workboard to another
  • change Task priority
  • add/remove a Tag from something
  • subscribe/unsubscribe
  • updated the name of
  • award a token
  • change policy
  • set the point value
  • placed ... up from grabs
  • what else?

In this way, other kind of activities which in a major way describe the hours spent by a worker - such as comments, commits, Task creation, Task marked as Resolved etc. can take more visibility, speeding up intervention report operations.

NOTE: Telling "what is minor" can be very subjective, but we you can rely on common sense when saying that stuff like "subcribe" certainly always carries a lot less weight than "doing a commit". That's the spirit of this filter. We can provide a default and then allow customization via code or other ways to be discussed later.

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valerio.bozzolan updated the task description. (Show Details)

At my company we have a similar situation however our management system is something we also actively develop. We solved this problem by configuring a web hook to hit an endpoint for the activities we are interested in having people track. The endpoint receives the transactions, pulls some additional info, and creates time-tracked activities for them in an aggregated list. Employees review the list and update time for each activity. It works pretty well and is not limited to activities from Phab allowing other systems to post activity to report, and for employees it’s nice because we can present the activity they’ve done and only require they estimate time spent as all other context is linked up.

I do think it would be nice to have additional filtering though, but it’s never been a high priority as it mostly serves for people to see what other interesting things migh my be happening, and not needed for reporting.

@valerio.bozzolan Fancy seeing you here. I'm Void from your phabricator instance.

valerio.bozzolan lowered the priority of this task from Low to Wishlist.Feb 15 2023, 10:49

Uhm. My root problem is: sometime I need to talk to my boss with a stand-up comedy monologue like this:

TOPIC A
I've done this
That
Then this happened
Etc.

TOPIC B
It happened this
Than that
Etc.

TOPIC C
Bla bla
Bla bla

So probably in my deepest dreams, I need a "Group by Object".

I noticed the "Bucket by Required Action" in Differential. So maybe "Bucket by Object" could be an actionable thing for the Feed, so, without hiding anything.