Feature request: Allow attendees to make personal notes on games

[marnen]

This is a feature request. If I'm signed up for a session, I'd like to have a text field for private notes about the session which I can see along with the session info as part of my schedule, but which aren't shown to anyone else.

Or, in user story form:
As an attendee
I would like to be able to store a few sentences of notes for my own use about a session
So that I can manage session-specific details (costuming, masking, etc.) alongside my schedule.

If that seems interesting, I'll try to make a pull request for it.

[nbudin]

Hey @marnen, thanks for the idea! I think it seems like a reasonable addition to our existing "favorite"/"hidden" toggle and could probably be implemented as part of the same model (EventRating). It probably needs some design input to figure out the edges of the UX, so I'm gonna tag @marleighnorton for her feedback.

[marnen]

Yeah. If I do have the time to make a pull request for this, of course figuring out a reasonable first stab at a UI will be part of that pull request.

[marleighnorton]

So back when we were considering show/hide/favorite toggles, one of the things I was told is that we don't want to store too much information that might get back to GMs and make them feel bad. And as part of that was the concept that nothing private is ever truly private, folks with the bits can (and sometimes have) done data mining that was not great for the community. So this makes me raise an eyebrow.

[marnen]

It seems like it should be possible to store this in a way that GMs don't have access to, no? Certainly that's what I was intending.

[marleighnorton]

@marnen Yeah, the case I was told about was a person on staff who did have access published some statistics that upset folks. I don't know how much we think that's likely to happen again, but it's happened once, for what it's worth.

I'm also dubious we want to get into the business of storing people's personal notes rather than focus on our core deliverables, but I feel less strongly about that, as long as we don't clutter up the UI too much.

[nbudin]

For the EventRatings, we did end up eventually finding a solution that prevents con staff from being able to see the ratings, so I'm less concerned about that issue than I was when we started working on the feature. People with access to the underlying database still do have access to that table, which is sort of inevitable, but currently that's just me and @dkapell, so hopefully that's ok.

[marnen]

@marleighnorton:

Yeah, the case I was told about was a person on staff who did have access published some statistics that upset folks. I don't know how much we think that's likely to happen again, but it's happened once, for what it's worth.

Access to what? The database, or stuff in the UI that they shouldn't have had access to? Is the risk significantly greater here than with the favorite/hide system?

At worst, I suppose we could encrypt the notes in the DB...

I'm also dubious we want to get into the business of storing people's personal notes rather than focus on our core deliverables, but I feel less strongly about that, as long as we don't clutter up the UI too much.

I get what you're saying, and a priori I probably would have said the same thing. This idea actually came from my wife and me getting prep data together for Intercon. We realized that we were having to (mostly) replicate the scheduling system's data in a Google Sheet or calendar just so we could store our costume notes and so forth, at which point I realized that if the scheduling system had this one more feature, we could completely get rid of all the extra data entry on our end and instead put our notes in the same place as all our other game attendance data in the scheduling system.

So to me, it looks like something that we wouldn't have guessed should be with the other scheduling stuff, but would turn out to improve usability if it's included.

I do understand the concerns about privacy and such, but I suspect those are tractable, unless there's something I'm not taking into account here.

[marleighnorton]

Just one more feature is a slippery slope.

But ok, let's think this through.

Just plain text? Emoji? Links?

• Links would be nice, if we're doing this, since then you could link to your character sheets if you liked and have that there too.

Any concerns about size/storage? Do we want to limit length?

• What if someone pastes all their character sheets in, do we care?

Where does it show? On the event page? In the calendar event sync? Both?

• Probably both, but editable only on the event page.
• And the calendar event should have a link back to the event page, regardless.

How do we want to show it on the event page?

• Near the top, probably, since the rest of the information on that page is fairly static.
• We could do a text field under the event title, a header, or a banner.

[marnen]

@marleighnorton:

Just one more feature is a slippery slope.

Indeed it is, and I was thinking almost that as I wrote it.

But ok, let's think this through.

Indeed, but also we surely don't have to implement a whole wishlist for the feature as I propose it to be useful—incremental development not going beyond what's actually needed avoids a lot of these questions, or so it seems to me.

Just plain text? Emoji? Links?

The minimal viable feature that I was planning to implement if I get around to making a pull request for this would be just plain text. Unicode emoji are themselves plain text, of course, not that I ever use them. I don't see why there would be any particular reason to support anything beyond that, at least for an initial iteration.

• Links would be nice, if we're doing this, since then you could link to your character sheets if you liked and have that there too.

Nice but inessential. We can always copy and paste URLs. Or there's presumably (correct me if I'm wrong) some sort of simple formatter on the game descriptions that could be reused here and do autolinking, but it hardly seems essential to me.

Any concerns about size/storage? Do we want to limit length?

From a usability point of view, I don't think we care, do we? I could see limiting to 10K per note (or less, I suppose) so malicious users don't blow up the DB storage.

• What if someone pastes all their character sheets in, do we care?

I don't know, do we care? Why would we, except for the concerns about storage mentioned above?

Where does it show? On the event page? In the calendar event sync? Both?

• Probably both, but editable only on the event page.
• And the calendar event should have a link back to the event page, regardless.

That's one of the things I was hoping to play around with in implementing this. I'm not 100% sure.

How do we want to show it on the event page?

• Near the top, probably, since the rest of the information on that page is fairly static.
• We could do a text field under the event title, a header, or a banner.

Good question. I'm not certain. I'd probably want it to show up in the calendar feed too.