To display or not to display empty site-wide activity tabs

[henry.wright]

The My Favorites tab doesn't appear when there are 0 favorites. The same thing happens with My Groups - when there's nothing to display the tab doesn't appear.

A slightly different thing happens with the Mentions tab. When there's no mentions, the Mentions tab is displayed and a message is given:

Sorry, there was no activity found. Please try a different filter.

I'm just wondering if things could be more consistent?

[DJPaul]

I agree. What do you think the best behaviour is?

[henry.wright]

I think persistent tabs would be better. Take for instance the admin bar links; when there's no site notifications, the 'Notifications' link isn't removed. Also, on member profiles, all of the tabs are persistent.

I'm not sure removing the tab when there's nothing to display adds value? To have things appear or disappear can be confusing to some users.

Those are just my personal thoughts, but either way, I do think things should be made consistent - at the moment the 'Mentions' tab seems to be an anomaly in the way it behaves when nothing is available to display.

[r-a-y]

Yeah, we could definitely use a better way to set the empty activity loop message.

I've had to override this message in a few plugins using the 'gettext' filter. Definitely not pretty.

[henry.wright]

@r-a-y +1. That would be useful too!

[tw2113]

Do we have a consensus on best behavior for this one? I have to agree that it'd probably be best to leave UI elements in place, but provide a default "nothing here" message.

[DJPaul]

We're closing this ticket because it has not received any contribution or comments for at least two years. We have decided that it is better to close tickets that are good ideas, which have not gotten (or are unlikely to get) contributions, rather than keep things open indefinitely. This will help us share a more realistic roadmap for BuddyPress with you.

Everyone very much appreciates the time and effort that you spent sharing your idea with us. On behalf of the entire BuddyPress team, thank you.

If you feel strongly that this enhancement should still be added to BuddyPress, and you are able to contribute effort towards it, we encourage you to re-open the ticket, or start a discussion about it in our Slack channel. Please consider that time has proven that good ideas without contributions do not get built.

For more information, see ​https://bpdevel.wordpress.com/2018/01/21/our-awaiting-contributions-milestone-contains/
or find us on Slack, in the #buddypress channel: ​https://make.wordpress.org/chat/