Not planned Friends functionality

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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"Followers" are really just the Buddies/Contact list and Friend list combined into one.

In vBulletin, you may have friends (mutual link) and contacts (people you add but do not friend). The interface was slightly clunky, and in all honesty it really didn't do anything special (it was just a list).

The applied format here is that you follow what your friends are doing, so you see the people you're following and people that are following your updates and activity. It's a much simpler format that deals away with confirmation screens to confirm connections and allows for a user to add someone to their Follower list and keep up with what they're doing (via the News Feed for example). I'm sure it needs to be fleshed out a bit, but really it's not different from the Friend/Contact list that was there before except that it is much more socially integrated.

If there's any suggestion to be made here, I would guess it would be to control which followers see what, and perhaps being able to file them into lists and build a user-specified permission system for their profile/content. However, looking at your Privacy Settings this is sort of already done if you select "People You Follow Only," meaning people you specifically add to your "Following" list (think of it as people you add to your Friend list).

I hope this helps clear it a bit? If not let me know. :)
 
I really like this Followers system. Best way to implement this sort of thing I've seen on any forum. The term "friends" is a little over the top IMO. So followers is a better way to go. Even if some people might associate it with stalking. lol
 
"Followers" are really just the Buddies/Contact list and Friend list combined into one.

In vBulletin, you may have friends (mutual link) and contacts (people you add but do not friend). The interface was slightly clunky, and in all honesty it really didn't do anything special (it was just a list).

The applied format here is that you follow what your friends are doing, so you see the people you're following and people that are following your updates and activity. It's a much simpler format that deals away with confirmation screens to confirm connections and allows for a user to add someone to their Follower list and keep up with what they're doing (via the News Feed for example). I'm sure it needs to be fleshed out a bit, but really it's not different from the Friend/Contact list that was there before except that it is much more socially integrated.

If there's any suggestion to be made here, I would guess it would be to control which followers see what, and perhaps being able to file them into lists and build a user-specified permission system for their profile/content. However, looking at your Privacy Settings this is sort of already done if you select "People You Follow Only," meaning people you specifically add to your "Following" list (think of it as people you add to your Friend list).

I hope this helps clear it a bit? If not let me know. :)

Very nice explanation David.

And I found this, because I follow you - so your post reply to this thread showed up in my news-feed.
 
"Followers" are really just the Buddies/Contact list and Friend list combined into one.

In vBulletin, you may have friends (mutual link) and contacts (people you add but do not friend). The interface was slightly clunky, and in all honesty it really didn't do anything special (it was just a list).

Yes, I know... trust me I (and many others) have spend day and night trying to wake people up over there at vBulletin's to do something about making the Friends functionality actually useful. :

Just a few of them:
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/show...=friends#post1875683
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/show...=friends#post1875534
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/show...=friends#post1682778 (from a 6-page customer suggestions thread)

Almost nothing has been done about it. How would you feel as a customer if you spend day and night trying your best and offering your free time and ideas to improve a product and there is almost none reaction from the company itself? So much of what we have been suggesting over the past 3 years is soooo valid and Jelsoft/IB just did not give us any insight of what they were thinking of it and what improvements we could expect. A goldmine of suggestions can be found over there at the good old vBulletin Suggestions forum and it seemed to me that Invision took a good look and implemented a fair amount of it in their own product. vBulletin was way behind, even 3 years ago... :(.

The applied format here is that you follow what your friends are doing, so you see the people you're following and people that are following your updates and activity. It's a much simpler format that deals away with confirmation screens to confirm connections and allows for a user to add someone to their Follower list and keep up with what they're doing (via the News Feed for example). I'm sure it needs to be fleshed out a bit, but really it's not different from the Friend/Contact list that was there before except that it is much more socially integrated.

Thank you for such a clear explanation. Appreciated!

If there's any suggestion to be made here, I would guess it would be to control which followers see what, and perhaps being able to file them into lists and build a user-specified permission system for their profile/content. However, looking at your Privacy Settings this is sort of already done if you select "People You Follow Only," meaning people you specifically add to your "Following" list (think of it as people you add to your Friend list).

I hope this helps clear it a bit? If not let me know. :)

Certainly! Still, if I understood correctly Followers do not have to be mutual Followers (called 'Friends' in other packages). So how then would it ever be possible to have an integrated 1-on-1 chat like Facebook has for example?

See my worries about the lack of Friends overhere:
http://xenforo.com/community/thread...27/page-3#post-22592

If I follow someone, but that person is not following me, it is not possible to have a chat (if that will ever become a future functionality, that is). It has to be a mutual 'following'. And that is what I don't like about this 'following' concept. People on my site are much more familiar with Friends. They use it all the time on Facebook and every other single networking site out there. Twitter is not used much at all and it seems that the concept of 'Followers' is much more fitting there. Why? Because of the simple fact that you can not do much more then following someone in the first place: there is no attached 'social' functionality available anyway. But on (non-Twitter) social networking sites it's a whole different ball game. 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.

Maybe I am wrong and someone can enlighten me? (I would love to have Friends back, so would my members)
 
"Stalker" is associated with criminals. So I think it would not be very appropriate.

depends on what kind of forum you have.
giggle.gif
 
Certainly! Still, if I understood correctly Followers do not have to be mutual Followers (called 'Friends' in other packages). So how then would it ever be possible to have an integrated 1-on-1 chat like Facebook has for example?

See my worries about the lack of Friends overhere:
http://xenforo.com/community/thread...27/page-3#post-22592

If I follow someone, but that person is not following me, it is not possible to have a chat (if that will ever become a future functionality, that is). It has to be a mutual 'following'. And that is what I don't like about this 'following' concept. People on my site are much more familiar with Friends. They use it all the time on Facebook and every other single networking site out there. Twitter is not used much at all and it seems that the concept of 'Followers' is much more fitting there. Why? Because of the simple fact that you can not do much more then following someone in the first place: there is no attached 'social' functionality available anyway. But on (non-Twitter) social networking sites it's a whole different ball game. 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.

Maybe I am wrong and someone can enlighten me? (I would love to have Friends back, so would my members)

XenForo already keeps track of followers and those who are following, so putting it together to form a mutual list of people should be easy, likely since it seems XF may not have a traditional friend list, an add-on to create a third block in the profile I don't think could be any easier.

In combination with the above, combining it with a chat function or other features around XF shouldn't be that hard either. Generally though, I don't think a Friends system would happen as it would seem redundant as they overlap a bit.
 
I want to be able to chat to any member of my site whether either one of us is following the other or not.
 
The attractive thing about friends functionality, is that it would be possible to connect them with privacy settings. I'd like my members to be able to set who can see what details, photos, messages on their profile. i.e. Everyone / Friends / No one.
 
The attractive thing about friends functionality, is that it would be possible to connect them with privacy settings. I'd like my members to be able to set who can see what details, photos, messages on their profile. i.e. Everyone / Friends / No one.

That's exactly what this covers:
If there's any suggestion to be made here, I would guess it would be to control which followers see what, and perhaps being able to file them into lists and build a user-specified permission system for their profile/content. However, looking at your Privacy Settings this is sort of already done if you select "People You Follow Only," meaning people you specifically add to your "Following" list (think of it as people you add to your Friend list).

Just instead of friends, it's "People you follow." But that's just the thing, I think it would get bloated trying to have a friends system, and a follow/following system, especially when the two would overlap in a number of places.

What what could be done here? Remove the Follow/Follower system completely and replace it with a Friends system, which I would imagine would need quite a bit of work, or keep it as is and put the Friends system over it, which I thought would make some things redundant.

Personally the way it works is fine with me, but I can understand people using a different term and having a different approach occur.
 
Showing affection for a member or connection with a member is different from following post content. Im sure that friends and followers functionality can be neatly integrated.
 
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