Not planned Friends functionality

Grover

Grover

Well-known member
Yes, it sounds odd, but I don't quite grap the concept of 'Followers' yet. In general I mean: I don't use Twitter and services like that myself, so I actually never 'followed' someone on systems like that.

So, being really used to the Friends feature in vBulletin, I do not know what the difference is between Friends and Followers. Somebody care to explain this to me?

I love Facebook and vBulletin (altough vBulletin uses the really confusing 'Contacts' & 'Friends' together... we put out so much suggestions to improve that, here's another one: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/show...ove-the-Friends-functionality-(with-Grouping)) for that matter, because you can setup all kinds of permissions attached to Friends and I really hope to see this in xenForo.

Privacy it of a utmost importance nowadays on Social Networks, but I am telling nothing new. Also on our vB 3.8 powered platform were we deal with very personal issues (it is about health-conditions) privacy options are a big deal.

Is Friends functionality like this going to be implemented?
 
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Yes, and another reason why you want to need Friends functionality is this:

Grover said:
For the future Calendar: Buddy Birthdays
(originally posted as a suggestion for vBulletin)

Another thing popped into my mind. What is one of the complete and utterly useless things in a board like vBulletin? Well... click on the Calendar and you know it.
wink.png


By default on every single day you see Birthdays presented from your boardmembers. I mean... come on, who wants to know?!
tongue.png
In my opinion such an overview of birthdays is pretty useless. As a regular boardmember I don't care if Miss. Marple has her birthday on July 29th if I check the Calendar on July 2th. At the most I am only interested in the birthdays of the people I have a bond with really. It is just like in real life...when you are sitting in the loo, staring at your birthday calendar in front of you, there are only entries on it from your family and dearest friends.

Sitting in the loo, staring at my laptop, and visiting my vBboard Calendar there are all these birthdays from every single boardmember all over the place!

Okay, and now the solution.
smile.png
Since this suggestions-thread is all about the vBulletin Profiles, you've guessed it : there need to be an integration (vBulletin really really needs to integrate more of it's modules/functions!) of the Calendar and the User Profile.

Look, as a boardadministrator I don't care at all which of boardmembers have their birthday on which date. Why not? Because vBulletin automatically sends out a birthday-email to my members (which is a great feature by the way!). But, seeing things through the eyes of a regular boardmember I think I would really want to know when my boardfriends have their birthday. Just like in real life. So instead of putting the Calendar shockfull of birthday-entries I think the following will be much more effective:

There needs to be an area inside the User Profile where you -as a regular member- can see which of your Buddies have their Birthday. And I do not mean a mini-calendar. No just an indication like this :

----
GirlyGirl has her birthday in 5 days on juli 31ste.
----

So 5 days before a buddy of yours has their birthday it shows up in your profile! And it keeps counting towards the Big Day. You see, this way you have kind of a birthday-reminder really and it's much more usefull then the big default Calendar stuffed with all the birthdays of people you don't care about.

My site needs to become much more personalized. Since vBulletin (what else?
wink.png
(edit: well... a big chance in the future it's called xenForo ) powers my site : I need it to provide me with those much needed tools.

Your thougts please,
---------------------------------

Things like these are a reason why I need to see Friends back in xenForo. There is a lot of Friends functionality that my members like on Social Networking sites and I am not sure if I understand the concept of 'Followers' fully yet.
Click to expand...

I do not have to know the birthday or getting an alert on it or whatever from people I follow. But I do want it from my Friends.
 
Brandon_R said:
Aren't the people you follow your friends?
Click to expand...

This keeps being the question indeed. Because of the fact they are not in my opinion, some functionality can become complicated or not fitting/convenient to attach to the Followers-concept. It is simple: when I follow you (and you not me), do you consider me as your friend? When you follow me (and I not you), do I consider you as a Friend? No, because none of us agreed upon being friends. It is even like this: if I follow you and you follow me... are we Friends? No. Not necessarily indeed, because it could be just a coincidence we follow each other...

You see, with Friends is as easy as it comes: you both agreed upon being Friends. So you can attach all kinds of functionality to that agreement alone...
 
It constitute that both members are interested in what the other has to say. That can even be in a negative way.
 
Grover said:
There the Friends concept has a bunch of functionality attached to it and for me it feels not quite right / seems more difficult to attach all kinds of Friends functionality to the Followers concept of XenForo.
Click to expand...

And this is another example of a practical issue that is happening right now:

Grover said:
Look, what is the most logical and intuitive thing one does when you see a profile that is blocked from viewing? Yes, you want to become friends with that person! So, in XenForo I expected that I need to follow that person to be able to see their profile (you follow a person to follow their content, don't you? :(). This would be the most logical way of thinking, wouldn't it? Since we are so used to this on all other social platforms. I think it's pretty odd that it is -apparently- the other way round (more or less) on XenForo: the person (who has blocked their profile) needs to follow me so, I am able to see their profile!

It doesn't make sense.
Click to expand...

(taken from http://xenforo.com/community/thread...profile-needs-better-social-stimulation.3754/)
 
vB friends functionality is not doing much in our forum... I think the system implemented here will be more popular, but only time will tell. For me it's not a big deal, since I want to keep all profiles public. No FB private nonsense on a forum for me.
 
Hi alfa1, it's the friends bit I don't see as being that useful on a forum, do you use the friends functionality on your VB site ?
 
Hi Gib, yes I do. I think it depends upon your community. But social networking in general is very popular on the internet and this includes friends. I think that friends functionality is only useful if you use it as a basis for other functionality. Just like facebook allows you to set your privacy settings or alerts you when a friend posts/does something. Its useful in this way. vbulletin friends function is pretty bad, but that only says something about vb, not about the possibilities of friends functionality.
 
I think part of the idea here is that the software is meant to be a 'modern' setup, not just limited to forums of old.
Personally, I say keep the friends setup, allow people to develop 'relationships', much like FB. I see no reason not to. Forums as we know it are dying/dead. As with anything, you need to keep up with the times if you want to succeed, and Xenforo is definitely doing that very well.
 
Friends functionality is really missing in XenForo when you come from vbulletin.

Follows are simply something completely different than friends. Importing friends as followers is quite close to being a bug.
It would be similar to importing threads as profile messages. Both are similar, but there is a world of difference.

The privacy function based upon people you follow makes little sense to me. I would follow problematic members on my site. That certainly does not imply a circle of trust.
 
I love the 'follow' feature of xenForo.

But I'd like to allow users have the 'friends' feature, too - something similar to facebook's friends, but not in a uncontrollable way(1000 friends would not be encouraged).

Friends created by the mutual agreement of both users would be able to share their personal or family albums, private collections of stuff, birthday party plans, itineraries and possibly many more.

I understand to a forum software, it might be tricky to accomplish this w/o hurting server performance. How to strategically design the additional fields/tables needed in the database would be so crucial in taking care of long-run potential issues this feature might bring up for any site with possibly bigger user base. So I figured it might be best for it coming from the xenForo core.
 
Thanks yolulz :) , but:
Vicki said:
I understand to a forum software, it might be tricky to accomplish this w/o hurting server performance. How to strategically design the additional fields/tables needed in the database would be so crucial in taking care of long-run potential issues this feature might bring up for any site with possibly bigger user base. So I figured it might be best for it coming from the xenForo core.
Click to expand...

Also, it is not trying to solve problems. :cool: It is a feature I am suggesting. I thought it is a very important feature in promoting user engagement and enhancing the social experience for a community site.
 

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