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:

1539619702913.webp

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:

Screenshot 2018-10-15 at 18.45.54.webp

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):

live.browserstack.com_dashboard (3).webp

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

localhost_21x_index.php_forums_main-forum.2_.webp

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!
 
I would never ask XenForo not to. What I would ask is for clarity when they do. Ive never said they they should not build existing add-ons, but I would argue that there may have been other things to build. Its not a good look, but I understand the rationale. My main concern was the roadmap and if they are indeed working on better ways to improve that and also are treating the suggestions forum as their roadmap, that solves my concerns. Maybe I was wrong for saying it was rude, I don't know, I would have liked a heads up thats all.


I really have to say thank you for this @Xon I appreciate you helping out with the importer. Would you be making your addon open to do the migration? Otherwise we would need our own importer as well.
I think its messed up that they called it 'reactions' same as your app......
 
Bear in mind we already use EmojiOne in smilies.

But, no, we have a commercial license that doesn't require it.
Right, thanks for that. Just wondering, if I download sprite sheets from their github repo to use with XF smilies and reactions (as the XF bundled sprite sheet has a limited number of icons), will XF's commercial license cover that? Or only the sprite sheet bundled with XF can be used without attribution?
 
Right, thanks for that. Just wondering, if I download sprite sheets from their github repo to use with XF smilies and reactions (as the XF bundled sprite sheet has a limited number of icons), will XF's commercial license cover that? Or only the sprite sheet bundled with XF can be used without attribution?
You don't need to display any attribution for any EmojiOne artwork used in XF.
 
@Chris D

Any chance to give us ACP option where user have to click on like (default one) to open and choose reaction, because if click give us just like and hover give us option to choose different reaction is difficult with people on my forum.

Also, option to disable some reaction per forum and per usegroup?
 
My main conundrum was solved. I did not know that the suggestions forum (at least more or less) was indeed the roadmap, and that is my mistake. I am sorry @Chris D

It's a no brainer really! User suggestions have been taken into due consideration ever since xF came into existence.

For example, navigation manager was one of the top-most requested suggestions before the the launch of xF 2.0 here, it was duly implemented in xF 2.0 here!

Push notifications is also implemented in xF 2.1 based on being the top-most requested suggestions here.

So, showing resentment by such a reputable and respectable add-on developer is quite unfortunate considering these suggestions also provide a great window of opportunity for Devs to focus their energies. Moreover, not everybody can afford the cost of buying costly add-ons and pay renewal costs every year on the top of buying the xF licenses. For example, I was staring at close to $500 in implementing desirable add-ons and then renewal costs every year. Implementing these most popular suggestions is simply fantastic for the end user like myself with very limited resources. For this all kudos belongs for xF Team! (y)(y)(y)
 
I know exactly how gutting it can be to have one of your most popular addons make it into the core, as vB5 implemented the @mentions feature from our Advanced User Tagging mod, which was the straw that broke the camel's back for DBTech's involvement with vB5.

That being said, I think it's important to note that unlike said other platform, the XF devs don't heck over 3rd party devs by making the platform an impossible mess for us to work with then choosing to focus on improving the core over improving things for developers. The XF devs also pay attention to our feedback whenever we suggest developer-focused improvements, especially if it's just a wee thing like adding another empty method that we can extend or something.

That being said, I think it would soften the blow quite a bit if the developers of 3rd party mods would get a wee DM saying something like "hey keep this on the D.L. but we're about to start work on this feature [link to suggestion thread] and we just wanted to keep you in the loop". If affected developers all said "yeah we got heads up about a month ago" that would probably calm some of the public outrage as well, not to mention giving developers time to refocus their efforts and transition into other projects.

Hopefully some of that made sense 😛


Fillip

Don't forget, this happened with vBNavTabs (navigation manager) when vB 4.2.0 was released. There was no warning that the dev team was working on a navigation manager, they just did it. We did not cry, complain, call it the end of the world and the addon, we adapted and added features that the core implementation lacked.
 
There is a lot of difference between a post that you dislike and a horrible post with abuse, flaming or spam.
There is also a lot of difference between a likeable post and a stellar post that saves the day.

As it looks now there will only be negative (-1), neutral (0) and positive (1) which makes the value of a horrible post the same as a dislikable post. And awesome posts are valued exactly the same as 'nice' posts.

The result will be that stellar members will not rise the ranks as they should. And problematic members will not go down as they should.

I think its very important to add weighting so that we can value the very bad or the very good.
 
Cor blimey, seems like we need reactions right now considering all the different reactions in this thread!

Great to see the team finally adding a solid reaction feature with positive and negative ratings. Getting it in the core is a great thing, I'm sure it will be extended out by many devs. The one suggestion I've read here that could be a nice core feature is perhaps being able to weight the reaction so high quality posts can get 'Gold' or 'Winner' or 'Genius' or something similar, with more points, to encourage people to post better quality material, still, looks real good as is.

The design from the screenshots seems pretty clean too, I like it.
 
a nice core feature is perhaps being able to weight the reaction so high quality posts can get 'Gold' or 'Winner' or 'Genius' or something similar, with more points, to encourage people to post better quality material, still, looks real good as is.

Sounds like we need some kind of trophy system... ;-)
 
Top Bottom