Flairs not working with automatic article publication activity (filtering issue)

Hello,
I have an issue with the Flairs functionality in CB Activity. Specifically, I cannot add a flair to an automatic activity triggered by article publication.
Even if I manually add a flair from the administrator panel (which is not an ideal solution, since I would like this to be available for users), the flair does appear above the activity, but filtering does not work for it. At this point, it is only a visual marker, and what I really need is for flairs to work as a functional filter as well.
It is especially important for my use case to be able to assign the proper flair to each type of activity, since I had to stop using tags (they don’t work at all in my setup — I mentioned this in previous tickets, but unfortunately I don’t have the time to debug it further).
Flairs look like a great feature, and I really want to use them, but having them work consistently across all types of activities is a critical requirement for me.Thank you in advance for your help!

Best regards,
Robert.

Flair filtering requires an entry in the _comprofiler_plugin_activity_flairs database table, which is just an activity_id and flair_id so relatively simple to insert if you're doing this programmatically. How are you generating your activity? Flair wasn't developed with programmatic activity in mind so that table inserting only happens on normal frontend activity. So for example it should work if you edit the generated article activity on frontend then apply the flair to it and save there. Backend is for management and moderation so none of this behavior applies there (same for mentions and hashtags in backend).

Yes, I can technically edit such an activity on the frontend after the article has been created, but when I try to add a flair there I get an error saying the activity has no content. If I then add any content, the activity loses its relation to the linked article.
So in practice, this makes it impossible to use flairs with programmatically generated activities (such as article publication triggers), which is exactly the case where I’d need them most.

Could you please consider extending the flair functionality so that:
1. A flair can be attached to programmatically generated activities without requiring content editing, and
2. The flair entry is inserted into #__comprofiler_plugin_activity_flairs without forcing the user to turn the automatic activity into a manual one.

If I understand correctly, this would make flairs really powerful for all kinds of activities, not just manual posts.

Yes, I can technically edit such an activity on the frontend after the article has been created, but when I try to add a flair there I get an error saying the activity has no content. If I then add any content, the activity loses its relation to the linked article.

That sounds like a bug and will look into that as that certainly shouldn't be happening. What version of CB Activity do you have and what asset does the activity have? It should have an asset of "article.ARTICLE_ID" to be treated as an article.

Could you please consider extending the flair functionality so that:
1. A flair can be attached to programmatically generated activities without requiring content editing, and
2. The flair entry is inserted into #__comprofiler_plugin_activity_flairs without forcing the user to turn the automatic activity into a manual one.

You should already be able to do that using that database table using either PHP or SQL. How are you generating activity? If with CB Auto Actions will add a parameter for that so it's easy to configure there.

CB Activity version: 6.1.1+build.2024.09.24.17.47.31.dc6223263
Activity asset: article.3252

I believe this activity was generated either by the CB Activity Bot or by core functionality (since I don’t see a plugin with that exact name in my CB installation or on the Joomlapolis site). I definitely didn’t configure anything in CB Auto Actions for it.

I enabled the option in CB Activity Plugin Settings > Activity > Article, with the tooltip saying:
“Log activity when a user creates an article. Note this requires the CB Activity Bot to be installed and published.”

(BTW: under this setting, categories can only be excluded. In my case, I would strongly prefer an Include as the second option, because I have dozens of categories to exclude and only a few that I actually want to include.)

I'm adding flair, and other activity features, support to ActivityEntity which is an object for logging activity, but you will not be able to select flair from that configuration and I've no plans to allow that as that far complicates that simple configuration. This however will be supported in CB Auto Actions so you'd need to switch your activity logging to that once this is all implemented if you want to set flair on automatic activity creation.

As for it not letting you save article activity without a message that was already fixed in CB Gallery 3.0 compatibility branch and am backporting that for a release early tomorrow.

(BTW: under this setting, categories can only be excluded. In my case, I would strongly prefer an Include as the second option, because I have dozens of categories to exclude and only a few that I actually want to include.)

You'll be able to deal with that when moving your activity logging to CB Auto Actions. Please understand that configuration is simple and is meant for the majority usecase. More specific usecases should move their activity logging to programmatic tools like CB Auto Actions or custom implementations.