Portal Feedback

The ACL Member Portal is currently being tested for acceptance by the ACL Executive. It will be in this state until Thursday 24th December, which is the target date for formal acceptance. Exec members should use this page to log bugs and feature requests. For present purposes, bugs are problems with the site which mean that it does not provide the basic functionality that was requested of the contractor, and feature requests are extensions beyond that basic functionality. Bugs will need to be fixed for formal acceptance to take place; feature requests will be handled subsequent to the formal acceptance as additional work requests.

Bugs

• I'm unable to reset the password to my account "steven", and get the error "The e-mail address sb@csse.unimelb.edu.au is already registered". There's a link "have you forgotten your password"; when I click on that, I'm told I don't have permission to access it. [Fixed 2009-12-18: This is an artifact of the double-accounts the ACL executive have (or had); as special accounts had been set up for the exec some time ago but new accounts were also created for them when we imported the member spreadsheet we ended up with duplicate accounts with identical primary email addresses which Drupal doesn't like. The imported accounts have been deleted for now so this should be fixed. When we import the member spreadsheet again we will need to merge the duplicates. Note that it's normally not possible for two accounts to have the same email address so this shouldn't be a problem in the future.]

• "Visit the ACL Anthology" and "CL Journal" are listed as a "Portal service" in the navigation section, but they are outside the portal. [Fixed 2009-12-19: These have been moved to an 'Other ACL Services' menu. An 'Admin Links' menu has also been created to make the admin-related links more accessible (visible to administrators and exec only).]

• An event can have more than one deadline (e.g. separate short and long paper deadlines); we don't want to be forced to create two events in order to capture two deadlines. [Resolving this (adding a way to add 2 or more deadlines with custom types) is not trivial. At this point I'd suggest that this is a feature request, not a bug, as the system we modeled the ACL's events on did not address this and the requirement did not come up earlier.]

• Clicking on "contacts" in my personal section of the navigation sidebar takes me to a page which says: "The contact form has not been configured. Add one or more categories to the form", but I don't have permission to view the page that lets me add categories to the form? (What are categories, and what is the form?) [This is the site-wide contact form. It allows users to contact the site administrators through the website. If you want this it is easy to set up. If you don't it is easy to disable. The form can be set up with various categories (like 'site feedback', 'admin help', 'membership questions', 'technical support', 'event feedback', etc) each of which can be configured to send to the appropriate persons and have a customised auto-reply message. The easiest way to go forward with this would be to have one of the exec log in to the 'webmaster' account, click on Contact in the Portal Services menu then follow the prompt to add categories (http://www.aclweb.org/portal/admin/build/contact/add). The page on the other side is relatively simple and explains what is possible and how it works; a little bit of playing around with this wouldn't break the site in any way.]

• processing of topic tags could be more robust [This is Drupal's taxonomy system. It was never in the original specification to be able to tag events or other items; it's been enabled this simply because it can be useful and is essentially ignored by the system if not used. There is not a lot that can be done about the fact that it uses commas to separate tags in free-tagging mode (which is the mode the site is currently in for events and other content) and therefore tags cannot contain commas, however it is possible to do some very fancy and advanced things if you don't mind spending a little time setting up the terms in advance. For example, you could create a controlled vocabulary of topics (and add hierarchy, similar terms, etc) which can then be selected from when creating/modifiying content if desired. See http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/taxonomy for more information. (Only the 'webmaster' account can currently edit the taxonomy settings & vocabularies directly, but this can be changed too.)]

• password reset message should come from some other email address than Ben's [This is happening because the site's admin contact address is currently set to mine (Ben's) to help with testing. It's on the list (with a few other settings) to change before the site goes live.]

Feature Requests

• For reasonable precision and recall over the events database, I think there needs to be a standard set of topics, with a checkbox for each, plus the possibility of adding further topics. [Something like this is not too difficult to achieve. See the response to 'processing of topic tags' above.]