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!
 
XenForo always has beta and release candidates first for 1st point releases (as well as major releases), it's only 2nd point releases that are released as stable (as they are essentially bug fixes).
To clarify, I think Martok meant “2nd” and “3rd” here respectively.

We’ll be installing 2.1 beta here first. Then there will be public betas and RC etc.
 
To clarify, I think Martok meant “2nd” and “3rd” here respectively.

We’ll be installing 2.1 beta here first. Then there will be public betas and RC etc.
Yes apologies, I was counting the points in the release number ie thinking 2.1 was a 1st point and 2.0.10 was a 2nd point. My mistake. oops
 
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.

Yeahno, not happening. I'm sticking to 1.X, not even considering to upgrade.
 
So am I understanding correctly that once I upgrade to 2.1 my themehouse reactions add on is useless or no ?
It won’t be useless, it will most certainly enhance the core reactions.

Just to elaborate on this, if you upgrade to XF 2.1 the day the beta is released you will have issues (could be double reaction bars showing, missing reactions from our something else. Not really easy to predict since we haven't seen the code changes). We do plan on both building an importer from our Reactions into XF 2.1 as well as updating our Reactions add-on to instead extend XF's default reaction system and add our enhancements into that. I definitely don't recommend you upgrade to 2.1 if you want to keep your reaction data until this has been completed or you'll be more likely to run into issues between the two :)
 
Just to elaborate on this, if you upgrade to XF 2.1 the day the beta is released you will have issues (could be double reaction bars showing, missing reactions from our something else. Not really easy to predict since we haven't seen the code changes). We do plan on both building an importer from our Reactions into XF 2.1 as well as updating our Reactions add-on to instead extend XF's default reaction system and add our enhancements into that. I definitely don't recommend you upgrade to 2.1 if you want to keep your reaction data until this has been completed or you'll be more likely to run into issues between the two :)
Thanks for the in depth reply.
 
Finally! This is a couple of years late but I didn't want to install add-ons for it because I knew that it simply had to be added to core. I never imagined that it would take as long as it did.
 
We don’t have a 🙄 reaction 😉

Though to expand slightly as much as it would have been nice to bring Reactions sooner, we still stand by that decision.

After all, I think we can all agree that XF 2.0 took long enough to arrive as it is. Implementing Reactions (which was actually a significant investment in time) would only have served to make that development time (and testing, and fixing, and iterating) even longer.

It also didn't fit in with our targets for XF 2.0 which although wasn't strict feature parity it was important not to let things "get out of hand" otherwise we could well still be developing and testing XF 2.0 right now...
 
Would love to see XF take a more agile approach. It doesn't look like they are far, though 2.1 could have been 2.1 - 2.8 if each feature was released in its own version.
 
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