Not planned Friends functionality

[Grover]

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?

 

[Alpha1]

Suggestion is also here:

Friends functionality

 

[Vicki]

Thanks Alfa1 for listing the link.

Before posting, I searched in the 'Suggestions: Bigger Features' forum, didn't find anything similar, so I went ahead with my post. I thought the 'Friends' feature is going to become one of the foundamental features to a forum software if gets implemented, so I didn't search in the small features section. After browsing it quickly today, I found that I like a lot of the posts in that thread(in small features session) though.

 

[Vicki]

Both 'Follow' and 'Friending' are useful, and they serve different purposes.

From my personal experience, 'Follow' allows me to follow the kind of people from whom I can learn a lot - it's basically following their knowledge.

'Friending', on the other hand, would allow users on any site(with xenforo installed) to have some private space to themselves. Basically there are 3 territories we can create with a great modern forum software:
1. a public forum node - public territory
2. a private forum node(for specific usergroups) - semi-public territory
3. friends - private territory

Equipped with these three, users are given more reasons to spend time on a community website.

With the friends feature available, you can:
- have your profile only read/writable to u+ friends
- have your blog entries(or under certain categories) only viewable to u+ friends
- submit personal or family photos to user albums that are only accessable to u+ friends
- have a seperate tab of news feed dedicated to all your friends' postings/activities

Btw, I am not a fan of facebook at all.
The 'friending' feature did not start from facebook either; Friendster was the most popular site having this feature before facebook.

With the friends feature available, you can probably also:
- recommend a thread, e.g. 'new restaurant in town' thread, to your friend who has specified he is interested in the food forum(if xenforo could add in an extra field allow users to fill in their current forum interests, possibly in their profile page?); to implement it, perhaps add a 'recommend' button at the bottom of each thread page, so that users could conveniently click on it and open up a list of his/her friends, then he/she picks the friend name from there, the recommendation then perhaps goes to the friend's profile post...;
- see a list of your friends who have posted in the same thread that you are currently reading; to implement it, this info could show up either as a sidebar item or show up as a list above the OP and to the left of the 'watch thread' link;
- recommend a showcase item that you thought would be helpful to one or more of your friends;
- recommend a RM item to your friends;

I am sure there could be many innovative ways to blend this 'friends' feature into the forum-centered community site...

 

[Vicki]

I noticed the thread I started 'Friends created by mutual agreement between two people' was merged by mod to this thread(previously in the smaller feature section).

I'd like to bump this thread a little...

While I am designing a site now, I found this feature becomes more and more of a foundamental need to our users as in many places I wish I could provide more privacy choices to our users from the beginning, like make only part of the profile page to a user's trusted friends - e.g., only friends can leave profile posts, or, friends can leave private profile posts while non-friends can leave public viewable profile posts, only show 'bookmarks' tab to trusted friends, and very importantly, make certain contents of 'Showcase' and RM only visible to a user's trusted friends, and making conversations only available among friends(otherwise we would not turn on the conversation feature for our site for security issues)......

Any idea if the developers would even consider make the friends feature into the core? Thank you!

 

[alfan]

I just hated the friends feature i vbulletin, it difficult to use and it really dident serve any real use other showing off how many "friends" someone had. But I absoluteley love the folow feature in xenfore - Its easy to use and serves the purpose af easily finding new content from friends or people you find interesting.

edit: just realised this was an old thread. I was commenting on the original thread.

 

[erich37]

I think a "friends-feature" would be psychologically the wrong concept for Forums.


IMHO, the best concept is to have both the following features:

- subscribe to all posts of a specific member, which is already implemented here at XF via "Following" and then you see the member's Newsfeed.
- subscribe to specific "topics of interest", whereby those "interests" could be grouped into something like: "groups" (a topic for a group of people) or "collections" (a topic for a specific member).

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[Alpha1]

I still think that Friends have very little to do with subscriptions. For example: Many of my friends keep posting rubbish on facebook at an amazing rate. I surely do not want to subscribe to their postings. But I do allow them to see my photos or profile details.

 

[Alpha1]

After all these years I still think that missing friends functionality is a weakness in xenforo. The concept of following leaves room for improvement. Following people works to a limited extent, but the lack of friends functionality as a trust & friendship factor keep being an issue.

I like how VK does it: you can follow someone and / or become friends. Some people have their account set not to get any friend requests. People can still follow them. Conversely, you can unfollow your friends while keeping the friendship and trust factor alive.
This flexibility allows for a lot of functionality to be based upon friends and followers.

For example: I have just received an alert that 2 of my friends are attending an event near me today. That's very useful information. Now that I know this I will go as well. Functionality like this would be an awesome enhancement to my community. Normally I would suggest this to @Jeremy so he could consider to build it into his events addon. But it does not make sense to do the same for followers.
This is just one of many examples I have encountered over the years.