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:

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):

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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!
 
Emojis in the title of the thread are inconsistent (perhaps due to the font used?) from what is shown in browser's address and title bars. I am using Google Chrome 70 on ElementaryOS Juno (based on Ubuntu 18.04) and have a set of Windows fonts installed.

xenforo-reactions-emoji-url.webp
 
it may be as soon as Q1 of next year that the ticket support and further updates to it cease.

Any source for this? There are a lot of very large sites on xf1 that it wouldn’t really be viable for them to upgrade, so I doubt they’d completely discontinue security updates for 1.x with essentially no (less than 3 months) notice
 
Security updates might be an exception.

XF 1.5 will be supported for a period of time and then we will eventually stop providing ticket support and further updates to it. The exception to that may be security releases, but that will depend very much on the nature of the specific issue, and some other variables such as how many users still use that version, etc.

We don't have an exact date for when these things will happen but it is unlikely to be a long period of time. Depending on how fast XF 2.0/2.1 is adopted (and XF2 is really exceeding expectations there!), it could be no more than a year.
 
Isn't it an unnecessary overload of options? Since positive, neutral, and negative are +1, 0, and -1 respectively, they are very much achievable by a single numeric input field (the one used in the custom score).
I think the approach is good for the general admin. I like it.
 
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I think there approach is good for the general admin. I like it.
In my opinion, it is more confusing and redundant now. I don't think Positive intuitively mean "+1", it could be anything positive (likewise other preset scores). If admins are to understand that these scores are numeric (score term itself suggests something numeric) and can be positive, negative, or zero, which are then used to calculate overall score then it is actually more intuitive to just have something like:

Code:
Reaction score: [        0 ][ + ][ -]
                Reaction score can be zero (nutral) or a positive or negative integer.
 
Another redundancy is in the Positive (+10) as the + sign itself signifies it top be positive.

What I think you are saying is there is no need to classify the reaction if it has a point value.

eg.
Positive is any value > 0
Neutral is a value of 0
Negative is any value < 0
 
What I think you are saying is there is no need to classify the reaction if it has a point value.

eg.
Positive is any value > 0
Neutral is a value of 0
Negative is any value < 0

Redundancy sometimes is unnecessary and may cause confusion. What extra information or clarification one gains when we say Positive (+10) instead of just +10? One might even think that "Positive" is one aspect of it and "+10" is something else. In case of negative values someone might even think negative of a negative (that is mathematically positive). ;-)

On the configuration side, it does not explicitly say scores for each entry like:
  • Positive (+1)
  • Neutral (0)
  • Negative (-1)
  • Custom score
Which could be confusing for those who don't understand it well. They might think Positive, Neutral, and Negative are covered (independent of an associated numeric value), so custom will be something else. Initially, when there were only three distinct values, three options were great, but now that it is a free-form numeric field, there is no need to have five form fields to convey one value. This causes more markup, more UI (often costly on small screens), more translation strings, and more confusion.
 
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