Allow making the highlight public without requiring edits

[berezovskyi]

Right now I need to click edit, add text or a tag and only then I can click on a drop-down and post the highlight publicly (I would typically add the "." tag).

Would be much better to click on "(padlock) Only me" and see the Bootstrap tooltip with the confirmation to make the highlight public.

[papatistos]

If I understand things correctly, what you are asking for is basically that it should be possible to share highlights (because highlights are simply annotations without content, i.e. neither tags nor text). - If that is correct, I'd suggest you change the title of this issue accordingly.

I have also been thinking that I should be allowed to publish highlights to a group or the public, but then I realized: what's the point really? How should anybody but myself make sense of a highlight without any cues from the person who created the highlight? So I suppose that that is why highlights cannot be shared.

And I think it also makes sense to keep the public realm free from highlights of this sort, simply as a matter of tidiness. On popular pages, we have (or will soon have) enough noise from annotations. No need to add highlights.

However, I would argue that the situation is different in groups. I think highlights should be shareable with groups because groups can be created for the very purpose of highlighting specific elements so that there is no need to tag each highlight. But then again, one could argue that if groups become large, we have the same problem as in the general public if you cannot turn off group highlights.

So perhaps the current state of affairs (private highlights only) is actually the most sustainable option and should be left alone. Instead, it might make sense to find other solutions to whatever problem this limitation might cause. For example, in my example about the group where highlights have a predefined meaning, the solution could be in making it possible to define one or more default tags that will be automatically applied to all highlights (and annotations) as long as they are active (similarly to how the selected group determines which group a new annotation will belong to). It could look something like this:

Of course, this possibility to select tags for the sidebar, should also determine which annotations will be visible in the sidebar. But that is a different issue.

[dwhly]

If that is correct, I'd suggest you change the title of this issue accordingly.

Strong agreement here. I could see allowing highlights to be shared, perhaps w/ a "Link only" permission model, where if someone gives you the link you can see their highlight, but otherwise it doesn't clutter the public channel. Being able to link to a passage with just a highlight is a powerful use case IMHO.

So I suppose that that is why highlights cannot be shared.

That is correct.

On popular pages, we have (or will soon have) enough noise from annotations. No need to add highlights.

Exactly.

However, I would argue that the situation is different in groups. I think highlights should be shareable with groups because groups can be created for the very purpose of highlighting specific elements so that there is no need to tag each highlight.

Yes, possibly a config option in group admin.

the solution could be in making it possible to define one or more default tags that will be automatically applied to all highlights (and annotations) as long as they are active (similarly to how the selected group determines which group a new annotation will belong to).

We've heard this suggestion before. Interesting.