XF 2.1 Reactions 👍😍🤣😲🙁😡

Welcome to the third in our "Have you seen...?" series for XF 2.1. We've had a phenomenal, er, reaction, to what we've shown so far. In case you haven't seen our previous two entries, you can check them out here.

As ever, to ensure you're kept up to date, we strongly recommend giving that "Watch forum" link a poke here and enabling email notifications if you haven't done so already 🙂

Today we're going to show you something that we have been talking about doing internally for quite some time - content reactions. This concept has been popular with XF users for a long time and has spawned some popular add-ons. We have quite possibly been talking about doing it since long before it was popularised by Facebook so, finally, here we are 🙂

Let's first look at how Reactions are set up in the Admin CP:

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As you can see, we've not exactly gone overboard in terms of the reactions we're shipping by default, but this felt like a sensible selection. We've added a concept of being able to assign either "Positive", "Negative" or "Neutral" to each reaction and although some of the default reactions have negative connotations, we decided not to assign any of them as "Negative" by default.

But, let's look at adding a new negative "Dislike" reaction:

localhost_21x_admin.php_reactions_add.webp

The process here should be fairly familiar if you have ever added new smilies as it uses a very similar approach for referencing the image/sprite. For your convenience we have included a "Dislike" icon in the sprite sheet should you wish to add it yourselves.

Most of this is self explanatory, but you will see we can also specify a "Text color". You'll see this in action... now!

21reactions.gif

The behaviour of the "Like" button isn't significantly different. You can still just click/tap the button to give a like (or remove the selected reaction) but to access other reactions you can hover over the link (or tap and hold on touch devices) and a tooltip will be displayed with your active reactions.

The "Text color" value we mentioned before is applied here to indicate your selected reaction. It is also displayed in the alert templates for reactions:

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We have also redesigned the reaction summary:

Screenshot 2018-10-15 at 18.58.33.webp

And the reaction overlay with a new tabbed design:

Screenshot 2018-10-15 at 19.02.20.webp

And, of course, Reactions are sent through push notifications (if not opted-out):

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We also show a summary of the most popular reactions (up to 3) on the thread list:

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Finally, you'll notice that the primary statistic listed on member list items, member tooltips and member statistics is no longer just a simple "like count" but instead we're now tracking an overall "Reaction score".

This metric is the total number of positive reactions minus the total number of negative reactions.

localhost_21x_index.php_members_&key=highest_reaction_score (1).webp

Most of this is self explanatory so we're probably ok to leave it there without going into too much detail.

Still quite a bit more to go, so we'll see you again later this week for more 🙂

Developers: you may be wondering about a few technical details. We have a special HYS for you guys in a couple of weeks focusing on a bit more detail for some miscellaneous power user/developer changes, so stay tuned for that!
 
First: Nice to see this coming to the core. I think this will spawn a lot of interesting addons. :)

My 2 cents concerning positive or negative ratings with increasing value:

If you do this, you essentially de-value the reactions that don't have a maximum impact.
Even if the associated reaction label will not really match, users will be drawn towards the extremes. Simply just because they want their voice to matter as much as everyone's else. In the long run, the majority of the users will just look at the points and use the reaction that will have the most impact.
You could try to counteract this behavior by hiding the values, but it's hard to say if that would work out in the long run.
 
Hmm is that URL of this thread good news in SEO terms @Chris D ? I see smileys in my URL.

Maybe if somebody searches for a happy face?

1. Seriously, I have doubts about much significant value of URLs in SEO.

2. As with descriptions I think the value is after the search once Google or whatever brings up the results. When the searcher sees certain words either in the URL or the displayed snippet that may encourage them to click on that specific site - but I don't think it is the word in the URL that brought the site into that search result.

So in a less obvious way the URL has an impact on the site being listed, but only after the main nuts and bolts of SEO was done - ie being indexed and being entered into a good position in the search result.

So the question here is which of these would make you click on it (first)

reactions 3.webp


(NB: that is a bit of a mock up I removed the word [Paid] from the TH result to make more of an even playing field)

Edit:

Google probably couldn't care less about emojis in URLs to be honest.

Part of my first point, however point 2 still stands

Seeing the emojis may attract some people, or may put others off.
 
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For example if I go around and rate all @Chris D 's posts with 'disagree' or another contentious rating then that is not constructive but highly annoying.

There is nothing necessarily negative about disagreeing per se.

On our forum we have "respectfully disagree - please say why"

This turns a potentially negative reaction into something positive. ie if you disagree then you should say why, and so get some (hopefully healthy) debate.
 
Just an FYI- I’m good with just using something other then a like button that livens up the forum a bit...

How does something so simple turn into something so complicated? Why not Just use as intended, a reaction.
 
Great work! is there going to be forums permission where admins can set were reactions can be allowed and permissions who can do these reactions @Chris D cheers, what about something like a rep bar on profile is that gonna be included somewhere?
 
@Chris D Is this addition only introduced to XenForo 2.X, or is it for 1.X as well?

(Also way to go, post a lot of updates days after my license expires :LOL:)

XF1 is basically EOL, it may be as soon as Q1 of next year that the ticket support and further updates to it cease. It would be wise to start looking into the feasibility of upgrading to XF2 now, even if you don’t make the move until a later date.
 
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