[FIXED] Broken/misleading breadcrumb navigation in forums section

S

Sperber

Member
Involved templates: tlg_group_wrapper, tlg_forum_view, tlg_thread_view

The purpose of a Social group section is mainly, to keep all content within the navigation of a particular group wrapped by the group wrapper, so the user don´t gets confused or irritated. Utilizing the forums discussion option inside this addon, the breadcrumb navigation unfortunal is doing exactly the opposite.

While clicking the groups navtab discussions and inside the forums section of the group, the breadcrumb is
screenshot-group-discussions-index-2021.05.10-10_33_00.png
Testgruppe #1 is linking correctly to groups/testgruppe-1.1/discussions.

Visiting one of the created forums inside the group or a thread within one of the group forums, this is when the breadcrumb navigation is misleading the users. A user expects 2 things within the forums section of groups: an inner navigation, so he can easily and logicly navigate back and forth inside the group forums or - at least - a breadcrumb nav linking to the next parent node inside the group.

screenshot-groups-forums_view-2021.05.10-10_40_08.png
Gruppenforen isn´t forwarding the user inside the group (!) to /groups/testgruppe-1.1/discussions, but instead to /forums/#gruppenforen.3 - which is leading to the forums main index page and the user finds himself outside of the group.

It even gets more problematic, when the webmaster has decided that he doesn´t want to have his well organized main forums index page spammed with hundreds of social groups forums and therefor disabled the display of the forums category hosting the social groups forums by disabling "Display in node list" in the XF category/forums settings. In that (very common) setting, the user gets even more irritated, since he now lands on the main index page of the forums - but with no group forums to display.

The same happens when a user is viewing a thread inside a group forum. The breadcrumb becomes
screenshot-groups-forums-thread_view2021.05.10-11_07_31.png

where Gruppenforen is leading again to the forums main index page instead of /groups/testgruppe-1.1/discussions while Gruppentestforum #1 leads correctly to the index page of that group forum inside the group.

This is irritiating many users since they are afraid, that the forums would be open to the public and displayed to everyone - and as result, they are immediatly stopping to post anything and in general quit using the social groups addon. This is in fact a tiny error with a horrific impact in regards to this addon and should be adressed ASAP.
 
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I don't have this problem myself. Perhaps it is down to setting the parent node for your Social Groups discussion forums to have "Navigation section" set to "Groups" (for the Groups tab/section) rather than leaving it at the default "Default (Forums)"? If so, you might need to set that for already existing group discussion forum nodes as well. Or maybe it's something else, I haven't tried investigating.
Mind you, it is normal and expected that the URL points to "forums/" for group discussion forums, but they should display within the Groups page layout.

I detail the node structure we use over here:

[NOT A BUG] - Forum node disappears (option "displat in the node list" is disabled)

Forums nodes are not visible inside the group while "Display in the node list" option is disabled.
nobita.me nobita.me
Maybe something else in there is the key to it working properly for our forum where it isn't for yours, if it's not simply setting the "Navigation section" properly.
 
The users shall and have to use forums inside of groups, since a group wall just offers the same mess than facebook groups: you can´t find anything, it´s completly unsructured and you´re loosing every discussion out of sight, when you haven´t been around for a day in busy groups. That´s why we force group owners to use the inside forums and prevent the use of the wall function. With that, we can´t change the parent node to groups, since that would be the wall - which isn´t available
 
So your issue is solely that the breadcrumb leads to the default page for the group, which by default is the "News feed"? In that case, you can change that. For the Social Groups addon's options in the XF admin panel, in the "Group options" section, the first option is "Default tab when viewing group", which you can change to something else.
I just now tested that, changing it to "Discussions" on our test forum, and it also worked correctly. The breadcrumb for the group name within a group discussion forum and within the posts correctly ended up redirecting straight to the group's discussion section.

Or... maybe I'm still misunderstanding what you're trying to do.

EDIT:
Ah, I do see that setting that does prevent you from being able to access the "News feed", as that side link just redirects you to whatever section it is set to default to through the XF admin panel. I suppose that's certainly a bug that there's no way to access it in that case. But for your specific case, I'd think that is what you want to happen anyway.
 
So... I'm still not understanding what your problem is then. You're saying that you want it to stay within the group and not redirect to the forums, but... for us, it does stay within the groups. The forum is shown within the overall structure of the group it is within. And I provided how we have it configured.
Have you actually tried that, or are you dismissing it out of hand?

Mind you, if a group is set to public, then the discussion forums within it are indeed publicly visible to everyone. If a group is set to private, however, they are correctly only accessible to members of the group. It might be nice to be able to set accessibility of group discussion forums separate from whether the group is public or private, but...
 
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