Activities dissappear from UI when internal processes are run by ignored users

[amercader]

CKAN version
2.0 onwards

Describe the bug
Activities shown on the organization or dashboard activity feed can suddenly disappear and show an empty list, eg:

to

Apparently the user didn't change anything on the frontend, and if you check the database, the activities are there.

The problem is how we handle the ckan.hide-activity-from-users configuration option. This allows you to define the users that you don't want to show activities from. It defaults to the internal site user as this is generally used to perform bulk internal processes like harvesting and you don't want to flood the activity stream with their operations.

The problem is that we first get the relevant activities from the database and then filter these activities in Python based on the users in the config option:

ckan/ckan/logic/action/get.py

Lines 2665 to 2671 in ccc582d

	_activity_objects = model.activity.organization_activity_list(
	org_id, limit=limit, offset=offset)
	if not include_hidden_activity:
	activity_objects = _filter_activity_by_user(
	_activity_objects, _activity_stream_get_filtered_users())
	else:
	activity_objects = _activity_objects

The default limit is 31 so if we had 6 initial activities that were visible and at some point the site user goes and eg imports 50 datasets, we will get the most recent 31 activities by the site user from the database, and filter them all out so the none will be shown in the UI.

I could not find any reason for this filter to not be applied at the database query level, which is going to be more performant anyway.

Steps to reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:

• Create an organization
• Perform some actions, eg update the org, create a dataset
• Run a harvester, or create more than 30 datasets using the site user API key (or the key of a user listed in ckan.hide-activity-from-users)

Expected behavior
Activities should not disappear