Recent activity (Activity Stream)

The Recent activity section within the Dashboard shows the recent activity across every site that the user can access.

If Recent activity has been disabled for a particular site, then the activity shown for that site within the Recent activity section will be limited to microblog posts.

Users have the ability to view the Activity Stream via All, Posts and Activity and they also have the ability to filter by Sites, Content Type and People.

Filtering activity

Activity can be filtered by Sites, Content type and People when using the Filter option:

Filter by site

Activity can be filtered by any site the user has access to, or by all the sites listed as favourites. Most recently viewed sites will be displayed in the drop-down list, or users can use the search field to search for another site.

Filter content type

Via the Content menu, activity can be filtered by the type of content, such as one of the module types (Files, WIki, etc.), but is limited to group messages or to comments on any type of content.

Filter by people

Activity can be filtered by People.

This filter does now list individuals if searched upon, but also can still filter on groups of users, such as other people in the user's organisation, people who are following or followed by the user, or any activity that mentions the user.

It is possible to apply aspects of all three filters at the same time.  For example, it would be possible to limit the activity to messages in Site X made by anyone in my organisation.

To remove a filter, click the red x next to the filter:

Actions within the activity stream

Commenting

To comment on an item within the Activity stream, click Comment and a comment box will appear. Type in your comment and click post to post it. Users can mention people by typing an @ symbol and entering the user they wish to tag's name (this uses the autocomplete feature, so starting to type a users name will display all relevant users) and can also add a tag, by typing the # symbol and entering their tag. If any comments already exist, the Comment button will be preceded by the number of comments.

Type in your comment and click Post. Your comment will immediately appear in the Recent Activity pane, under the original listing:

If multiple comments have been added to an activity, the two most recent comments will be visible, with the opportunity to view all of the comments provided:

Liking

As discussed in more detail, any activity can be liked.

Sharing

Discussed in more detail here, group messages can be shared with others.

Additional information

One of the more obvious changes to the Recent Activity pane is that more information about each piece of content and the related actions is displayed in a more visual fashion. The standard display of content in the activity stream is as follows:

1. The name of the user who took the action (and their avatar) is shown, along with a description of the action (here, "liked a blog post").
2. The relative time of the action ("Just now") and the site where the action was taken are listed.
3. More detail about the content itself is displayed, such as file name, file size, author and original content date, etc.

When comments have been added and items liked, they will be displayed as well:

Removing group messages

As noted here, group messages may be deleted from the activity stream by users with the appropriate privileges.

Infinite scrolling

There is no pagination for the Recent Activity. Click Load more to display more activity

In 5.3, we have made several improvements to the activity stream, including:

• Users now have the ability to choose wikis, blogs and event activities to be suppressed from the activity stream. This is done when creating or editing the wiki, blog or event activity and the user selects the Suppress all notifications and activity checkbox:

This will ensure that on creation, or on any future updates of this content, the activity stream will not be updated.

• You can now allow a microblog to be sent to an entire site group. This can be sent by a member of that group or from site/system admins. To do this, when writing a microblog, you have the share option:

Or, via More actions > Share:

 You can now select group or organisations as a recipient:

• Groups can now be mentioned within the activity stream:

To enable this, navigate to Admin > Site settings > Security:

And within the @Mention group drop down, select either Internal users only or All site members to enable the ability to mention groups. Click Save to save your changes.