User notes

A user note is a record an administrator keeps about a member account: what a support case was about, why an account was suspended, what was agreed in a phone call. Notes are filed under categories and can carry a review date.

Whether to use this screen at all

Decide that before you start, because the screen is only half-built and switching to something else later means retyping.

It works for one thing: writing a note against an account and reading it back later. That is genuinely useful on a hub where more than one person answers support mail and the next person needs to know why an account was suspended in March. If that is your problem, the screen solves it.

Almost everything else on it does not work. Seven of the toolbar's actions — Publish, Unpublish, Archive, Check-in and Empty Trash on the list, Save & New and Save as Copy on the form — submit tasks the notes controller does not implement, and pressing one simply redraws the screen. Edit and Trash reach real code but read the selected rows under a name the list never posts, so they behave as though you had ticked nothing. The column sort links fail. Deleting a note cannot be done from the interface at all.

So: use it if you want an append-mostly log against an account and can live with notes accumulating. Do not use it if you need to retract, tidy or archive what you write, or if the notes have to be got rid of on request — a data-protection erasure request cannot be honoured from this screen.

Notes live in com_members, at Users → User Notes, or under Users → Members → Notes. Categories are ordinary content categories belonging to com_members, at Users → User Note Categories, which opens com_categories.

The note list

Each row shows the User the note is about, its Subject, its Category, a status icon, the Review date and the note ID. Selecting the user's name opens the note. A note someone else has open shows a checked-out marker.

Filter with:

• The search box, which matches the note's subject and body. Enter uid:123 instead to list every note about one account by its member ID.
• The category menu.
• The status menu: Published, Unpublished, Archived, Trashed, All.

The toolbar carries New, Edit, Publish, Unpublish, Archive, Check-in, Trash and Options. When the status filter is set to Trashed, Trash is replaced by Empty Trash.

Writing a note

Notes are written one at a time and only from the New button. Everything else on the toolbar is either inert or misreads the selection, so this is the whole of what the screen does. Nothing here is sent to anyone and nothing is visible on the site.

1. Go to Users → User Notes.
2. Select New.
3. Fill in the form:

Field	Meaning
Subject	A one-line summary. Required
Body	The note itself, in the editor
Category	One of the note categories, or none
User	The member the note is about. Required
State	Published, Unpublished or Trashed
Review time	A date to look at this note again. Shown in the list's Review date column and left blank if you do not need one

4. Select Save.

Apply saves and stays on the form; Save saves and returns to the list.

Note categories

Categories organise notes; a hub with a handful of notes does not need them, one that logs every support contact does. Decide early whether you want them, because the note list's category filter is the only way to narrow a long list — the sort links do not work and the search box matches subject and body only.

Go to Users → User Note Categories. The screen is com_categories scoped to com_members, the same manager used for article categories, and it behaves the same way: create, edit, publish, reorder, nest, batch-process and trash. The categories it shows belong to notes alone; they do not appear anywhere else on the hub.

A note does not have to have a category, and the note list's category filter is the only thing categories change.