Investigate use of "guestbook at request" feature on Demo Dataverse

[jggautier]

@sbarbosadataverse

[jggautier]

For more context, I'm adding a link to the email conversation that prompted this GitHub issue, where folks planning to use Harvard Dataverse expressed interest in what the "guestbook at request" feature would let them do. The email conversation is at https://help.hmdc.harvard.edu/Ticket/Display.html?id=357131

[cmbz]

@jggautier could you clarify what is meant by investigate here, beyond configuring HDV?

[jggautier]

In a Slack conversation on Feb. 20, @sbarbosadataverse wrote about wanting "to confirm it's working exactly as you described"

[cmbz]

@jggautier Is the recommendation then to turn on in demo first to confirm, then HDV if the feature behaves as expected?

[jggautier]

I'm not sure what @sbarbosadataverse had in mind.

Maybe adding this functionality to Demo Dataverse or maybe to an AWS instance so that @sbarbosadataverse can review it? Or maybe it'll be helpful for @sbarbosadataverse to review documentation related to the functionality and the results of any UX research that was done when it was being worked on?

@sbarbosadataverse what do you think?

[sbarbosadataverse]

Yes, let's move to demo and I can actively review and test.

[jggautier]

There might be some conversation happening soon in a thread in the Dataverse Users Community Google Group about using this feature.

[jggautier]

Just following up on this after reviewing my conversation with the user who's interested in this feature.

When this is picked up for a sprint and a developer can add this feature to Demo Dataverse, I imagine we'd like it configured so that by default it's turned off for all collections. And collection admins can turn it on the way Jim described in that Google Groups thread.

[jggautier]

Just noting here some GitHub issues describing recent changes and possible changes to the way this feature works:

• Emails sent to Dataset Owners from "Guestbook at Request Access" missing key information and are hard to read due to Q/As being in random order and no formatting between dataverse#10581
• Bug for ADA: the 4 fields (Name, Email, Institution, Position) for guestbooks are editable for logged in users dataverse#10625

[jggautier]

Might be helpful to keep an eye on a recent Zulip thread where the manager of another Dataverse installation is asking questions about configuring the "guestbook at request" feature.

[pdurbin]

@dliburd and I had a quick chat about this in the context of https://help.hmdc.harvard.edu/Ticket/Display.html?id=369533

I signed up for an account on ADA (where this feature is on) so I could see what the UX is like when you click "Request Access" on this file, for example: https://dataverse.ada.edu.au/file.xhtml?fileId=19166&datasetVersionId=3979

Here are some screenshots:

As you can see, the guestbook is shown. Dwayne and I agree that this behavior is quite nice!

As for trying this on demo, judging from https://guides.dataverse.org/en/6.4/installation/config.html#dataverse-files-guestbook-at-request we have a couple options:

• turn "guestbook at request" on globally
• leave "guestbook on request" off globally and selectively turn it on for a few collections for testing

If we go with the latter option, whoever picks up this issue would need to know which collections to turn on "guestbook at request", of course.