Flow pages improvements

[knolleary]

The flow pages haven't had much attention and are overdue a face-lift to improve them. We have also had some direct feedback on missing features/capabilities that would make it a better user experience

There are various sources of inspiration to draw from, such as https://www.printables.com/

The following tasks will need spinning out to their own issues, but wanted to start getting a list written down so we can make progress.

Replace 'ratings' with 'likes'

The current 1-5 rating system doesn't really work at the scale of engagement we have. A flow can swing between 1 and 5 stars based on small numbers of ratings.

The proposal is to replace it with a simple 'like/heart/thumbs-up' option.

Download stats

We currently have no way of tracking popularity of flows.

The proposal here is to:

1. hide the flow JSON by default - the flow viewer serves as a better visualisation of the flow
2. have a 'copy flow' button in place of the json
3. count clicks of the flow button (with suitable debouncing to avoid single user can click happy)

This count can then be used in the sort-by view

Categories

Categories were added to Nodes but not to flows. We should continue that work so that flows can be categorised and searched for.

Tagging

Categories are currently managed by moderators. Tags are for the flow author to set - but we don't provide any way of browsing/searching by tag. That should be added.

Commenting

This will need more thought, but it would be nice to have a way to have inline comments for a flow. Any type of user-generated content will need moderation etc. I wonder if we can leverage discourse for this in some form.

[TotallyInformation]

I like the ideas.

Do we want thumbs down as well as up?

Comments are likely to need at least some moderation. If there is a way to limit to forum members, that would be great. Most decent comment systems do require some kind of user management. I've used both Disquss and an open source thing that uses GitHub discussions. Using the forum membership would be nice though. Might also be worth thinking about putting the comments system behind a switch so that people who don't want to be bothered with them don't have to load the javascript library.

If doing thumbs down, might also be good to require a comment so that issues can be tracked.

I've had some good success with Astro recently. This is a nice balance of static and (if wanted) dynamic outputs that leverages VueJS so would be in keeping with Dashboard. I'm only using Cloudflare free hosting and you will need something a bit more dynamic to allow inputs and commenting but having everything based on JavaScript/Node.js (Typescript actually but I can just about forgive it for that!) is handy. I know that some people are using serverless functions for form processing.