How can I tell who is online when looking at their avatar?

[Dean]

When viewing a thread, I see no difference between people online vs offline.

Clicking on the avatar does not seem to indicate that either.

What am I over looking?

?

 

[Grover]

I think different . Having to click on something to see who of my Friends (Followers?) is online, is not good. On a social network I need to see immediately who of them (or my team) is online. Again... facebook does an excellent job on this by showing your online friends on the bottom status bar. Ready for you to chat/contact them. And this is how it is supposed to work, in my view.

I dearly hope it actually will be a goal of xenForo. How would you know which of your Friends are online if you do not get an instant 'notification' of that? Yes, one can obviously look at the user's online box, but this is the whole point: as an enduser to a social networking platform I do not want to look at a who's online list full of people I might not be interested in. I want to see which of my Friends are online. This is how IM clients like Windows Live Messenger work: you have a list of people that you want to talk to, not a list of everybody in the world who is logged into Windows LM. My vision of state-of-the-art 'forum' software would be like that: we need an area/functionality that shows us which of our Friends (or Moderators, because I also want to be able in xenForo in the future to divide my Friends into different groups, because that will make contacting them much easier) are online. Immediately.

I love the way WLM pops up a notification in the bottom right corner telling me that Friend X is online. I love the way Facebook does it (as explained above). Now I need a forumpackage that can resemble that essential functionality. vBulletin doesn't. Invision (as far as I know) doesn't? Will xenForo be the first?

Well... XF recently added functionality that is a good step in the right direction:



When I saw a while back suddenly some of the usernames in the above member list displayed as bold , I wondered what that meant. Were those people new XF staff members? Nope... after a while I found out that it were the people I was following. If I need to think about something (how something functions)... then my members... you get the point.

But this new functionality makes it so much more clear and it's even more in line with XenForo's social goal. Great!

 

[dutchbb]

I wouldn't like a colored dot (especially green) next to the usernames very much. That would ruin the clean look a bit for me. I'd prefer a hover info box over that (unless someone has a better idea).

And if you really need to use a dot, the one from the thread list looks nice:



And no dot when offline.

 

[Crispy]

I use the green dot in vbulletin a lot, to know if it's worth replying now or later. Would very much like to see this function in XF

 

[Paul B]

I use the green dot in vbulletin a lot, to know if it's worth replying now or later. Would very much like to see this function in XF

A simple add-on and template modification is all that's required:
http://xenforo.com/community/threads/online-status-indicator-within-threads.8813/