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!

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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!
 
Is there a setting where we can adjust the pop-up time for the hovering of reactions?

On Firefox it takes like a second before it pops up when the mouse hovers on the Like button.

I would say it would be much better when it instantly pops-up. Much better.
 
I find reactions under the thread title very distracting.

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Also having the username and forum title no longer muted is distracting. The focus on pages like forum view and new posts really need to be on the thread title. The way it is now makes focusing on the all important thread title very difficult.
 
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I’m having a tough time with reactions on mobile safari ios here, I keep activating peek and pop due to force touch.

I think a single tap on mobile should give you the reaction menu instantly. That’s how I have it setup with @Xon’s version and it’s nice and snappy.

A second tap on the same location (over the ‘Like’ text), activates a like, alternatively a second tap over any of the reaction icons activates that reaction (including the like icon)
 
On mobile Android I'm finding I either get the open new link box or it selects the like text to copy, really tricky to use.

Hopefully an add on will appear to have the reactions displayed individually like Lukes original, super easy and intuitive for all users. Lots of old gits on my forum that will be completely unaware to press and hold.
 
I find reactions under the thread title very distracting.

View attachment 187312


i also find the reactions in that position distracting and confusing, i had to do some tests to figure out what why exactly there was a like symbol there,
now i know, it means someone had liked that first post, a bit confusing

it should probably tell you how many likes its has, and other symbols
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but it seems kinda a weird spot to put it, it doesn't seem like its that important to be even put there

here is some better spots
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even so in my picture, the icon looks weird, its better in writing on the right side,
but even so.. still not nessessary information, why is it important to know how many likes the first post has,

im going to remove that icon from my forum in the thread list, unless they put it somewhere else


i use a like add-on in my forum, it adds up all the likes in all of the thread and then its tells how many likes there is in the whole thread
you can also inside the thread view by total likes or first likes in first post

it looked something like this
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but ya i agree with andy, its distracting in the current position its in, hope they can add an option to disable it

but i love the reactions feature!! im going to allow dislike on my forum:ROFLMAO:

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Reaction Alerts are not consolidated, like post/reply alerts. This leads to a lot of repetitive Alerts when you visit the site, especially when XF2.1 is new and users will be trying them all out.
I'd like to see these consolidated into a single entry, eg. "Fred and 3 others reacted to your post in the thread ABC123 with Like"
 
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