Global Newsfeed (recent-activity) Filters & Compact Mode

Alpha1

Well-known member
The XF Global Newsfeed (recent-activity) is really great as it shows all new content from any content type. But IMHO it's too chaotic to become popular. By providing no way to filter between useful data and irrelevant data people are just not using it.
Please add a way to filter recent-activity, so that we can adjust what content we want to see.
Please also add settings for this. In admincp and in user account.

I would find the following settings really useful:
  • Hide new likes/profile changes (avatar/home page/location/profile fields)
  • Show only new likes/profile changes for users you follow.
  • Combine entries about the same thread/item: Alfa1 and 3 members replied to thread X.
  • Filters to hide one or more content types: media/Resources/Profile/Forum/pages
  • Hide read content
  • Auto-refresh
It would also be useful to have a setting to make the global newsfeed (recent-activity) more compact:
  • Hide snippets.
  • Hide forum.
  • Replace thumbs with smaller versions.
  • Show mini avatars.
A Compact Mode for Global Newsfeed (recent-activity) would show more content in the same space and make it more useful.
 
Upvote 14
Additional improvement that would help mobile users:
  • Clicking anywhere on the div.content should link to the activity. Not just hotlinked text. Name should not link to profile. (there is already an avatar to click.
  • Replace 'show older items' with infinite scrolling.
  • Make 'Your NewsFeed' a call to action button.
Currently its hard for mobile users to tap the correct link, while it is clear that the user wants to go to the latest content.
 
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'Show older items' should just be replaced with infinite scrolling. I'm not a fan of of it in nearly all places, but it does work well for non-paginated newsfeeds such as this.
 
'Show older items' should just be replaced with infinite scrolling. I'm not a fan of of it in nearly all places, but it does work well for non-paginated newsfeeds such as this.
I agree!

And making the recent-activity formatted in a better way could boost user activity/engagement too. Facebook did its fortune on it in the early days (and now too!).
 
To illustrate why a global newsfeed is needed. Here is how /find-new/ looks on sites with addons:
upload_2016-11-13_14-41-38-png.143658

Users are not going to click all those tabs to find new content. And even if they would they would not find new comments and reviews for media and resources.
We need one place to find all new content. A global newsfeed with new content only would be the optimal place for it if it will only show new content in a compact way.
 
@Chris D said that this is not a xf2.0 feature but they are thinking about it for the future... I hope in a great 2.1 release with a "new content manager" and a new "what's new page" that can integrate all the content types in a single list (filterable list), and the possibility to save a "custom streams" giving a name so users could create their custom streams with filtering set up (with its own rss feed).
 
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