Implemented Recent actions

[---MAD---]

Howdy,

Instead of our profile being pretty much empty unless we are popular enough to know enough users to post on our walls, how about displaying recent actions?

Ie "---MAD--- liked post x.", "---MAD--- posted y in thread z.", "---MAD--- recieved trophy D", "---MAD--- commented on user a's profile".

Would give profiles a bit of activity and more reason for other users to visit profiles and make use of them.

Thoughts?

 

[Mike]

Wall sounds too much like Facebook to me...

Wall is actually trademarked by Facebook. You can't use FB's APIs if you have stuff that could be confused with them. (According to their dev docs somewhere.)

I might be in the minority here, but I don't really like how FB does the little group of things. I can't see when most of them happened, but they're obviously folded.

From a technical standpoint, I wouldn't expect to see something like that, at least in the short term. That would involve creating effectively another view of the news feed, but also adding filter rules. A new tab to represent this is significantly more straight forward--probably a 15 minute job to add as the info is all there, ready to go. For me, that seems to give most of the benefit.

 

[Brandon_R]

That depends whether Mike and Kier intend to implement the suggestion and if so, how they implement it.

Yeah, when i say we, i mean the devs. Kinda like football talk, We win when its actually the football team that won

 

[Paul B]

I wasn't aware "Wall" was a FB trademark, glad about that

If the new tab is that "easy" Mike then it might be worth trying that route first to see what the response is.
At least then it's "only" 15 minutes of your time and effort wasted if it gets a general thumbs down, rather than a lot more doing something more involved.

Of course I'm not just saying that because I suggested it

 

[Floris]

Yeah, when i say we, i mean the devs. Kinda like football talk, We win when its actually the football team that won

Haha, I like your jokes.

 

[Brandon_R]

I wasn't aware "Wall" was a FB trademark, glad about that

If the new tab is that "easy" Mike then it might be worth trying that route first to see what the response is.
At least then it's "only" 15 minutes of your time and effort wasted if it gets a general thumbs down, rather than a lot more doing something more involved.

Of course I'm not just saying that because I suggested it View attachment 1176

Didn't know it was a trademark

And yeah we should take the more efficient and practical route.

 

[Floris]

Facebook is a step away from being an IPO, so it's in their best interest to lock down that what they claim to be their unique features.

 

[James]

I agree we could do with a less facebook-y implementation. An alternate presentation could be to the right of the profile header. You could easily make space for a 300px wide column to show the recent activity...

View attachment 1166

Just thinking out loud.

What about using that area and creating a vertical scroll of activities?

 

[erich37]

Howdy,

Instead of our profile being pretty much empty unless we are popular enough to know enough users to post on our walls, how about displaying recent actions?

Ie "---MAD--- liked post x.", "---MAD--- posted y in thread z.", "---MAD--- recieved trophy D", "---MAD--- commented on user a's profile".

Would give profiles a bit of activity and more reason for other users to visit profiles and make use of them.

Thoughts?

when this is being implemented, it will certainly kill XenForo.
This would be the perfect start for a kitchen-sink-nightmare and build huge confusion among members, as the activity-stream will compete with the Forum.

If you want a kitchen-sink, go and install yourself a copy of BuddyPress.org and you will have all the features you are asking for in this thread. Been there, done that, scrapped it.

Webmasters need to focus to have "activity" within the Forums, rather than focusing of having "activity" on user-profiles.

If you want this feature, please get this via an add-on. I will not buy any XF-licence when this is being implemented.

 

[Peggy]

IMO, the profile page is fine exactly the way it is. I just don't see a need to go changing everything around in there, when there are many other areas that the devs need to work on to get this software ready to sell.

Adding custom profile styling, yes, sometime in a future version.
Making all of these additional changes to it, no.

GOOD thing about XenForo is that it is easily customized with template edits, and has a great plug-in system.

 

[Onimua]

when this is being implemented, it will certainly kill XenForo.
This would be the perfect start for a kitchen-sink-nightmare and build huge confusion among members, as the activity-stream will compete with the Forum.

If you want a kitchen-sink, go and install yourself a copy of BuddyPress.org and you will have all the features you are asking for in this thread.

Webmasters need to focus to have "activity" within the Forums, rather than focusing of having "activity" on user-profiles.

If you want this feature, please get this via an add-on. I will not buy any XF-licence when this is being implemented.

The profiles are part of the forums, and the activity you do is presented in a few areas of your profile already. As it is, if I want to see what an individual user was up to on the forums, there's no way to do that.

Your logic of keeping keeping activity on the forums separate from the activity on the profiles doesn't make sense. So far all the features in XenForo are linked in some way from wherever you are. Why is the user profile suddenly off limits?

 

[erich37]

As it is, if I want to see what an individual user was up to on the forums, there's no way to do that.

did you already discover the Tab named "Postings" at your own or other user´s Profile-pages ? In fact this is showing what an individual user was up to on the forums.

Trust me, there is other software out there which merged the Facebook-approach with a Forum - and it is a massive fail. Webmasters are complaining like crazy.

You might think it is only a small feature which is going to be added, but even small features can destroy the full system.

 

[Peggy]

The profiles are part of the forums, and the activity you do is presented in a few areas of your profile already. As it is, if I want to see what an individual user was up to on the forums, there's no way to do that.

The "Everyone's Newsfeed" link in your profile helps with that.

 

[Brandon_R]

when this is being implemented, it will certainly kill XenForo.
This would be the perfect start for a kitchen-sink-nightmare and build huge confusion among members, as the activity-stream will compete with the Forum.

If you want a kitchen-sink, go and install yourself a copy of BuddyPress.org and you will have all the features you are asking for in this thread. Been there, done that, scrapped it.

Webmasters need to focus to have "activity" within the Forums, rather than focusing of having "activity" on user-profiles.

If you want this feature, please get this via an add-on. I will not buy any XF-licence when this is being implemented.

http://xenforo.com/community/posts/38313/

 

[---MAD---]

when this is being implemented, it will certainly kill XenForo.
This would be the perfect start for a kitchen-sink-nightmare and build huge confusion among members, as the activity-stream will compete with the Forum.

If you want a kitchen-sink, go and install yourself a copy of BuddyPress.org and you will have all the features you are asking for in this thread. Been there, done that, scrapped it.

Webmasters need to focus to have "activity" within the Forums, rather than focusing of having "activity" on user-profiles.

If you want this feature, please get this via an add-on. I will not buy any XF-licence when this is being implemented.

I don't see how it would kill activity on the forums? If anything I see it increasing activity as people take part in more discussions as they follow their friends or people are they are interested to discussions they have posted in or been involved in (liking a post etc).

 

[Onimua]

did you already discover the Tab named "Postings" at your own or other user´s Profile-pages ? In fact this is showing what an individual user was up to on the forums.

Trust me, there is other software out there which merged the Facebook-approach with a Forum - and it is a massive fail. Webmasters are complaining like crazy.

You might think it is only a small feature which is going to be added, but even small features can destroy the full system.

The Postings tab only shows your posts. It doesn't show content you liked, whether or not you've recently changed you avatar, left a profile message, or even commented on a profile message. So no, it doesn't show what a user was up to entirely, only what they've recently posted and that's it.

The "Everyone's Newsfeed" link in your profile helps with that.

I'm aware of that but it doesn't do what I had said:

The profiles are part of the forums, and the activity you do is presented in a few areas of your profile already. As it is, if I want to see what an individual user was up to on the forums, there's no way to do that.

The News Feed is a compiled list of all users, and if you're following a bunch of people (mainly speaking about Your News Feed), you can't filter out specific people and their activities and it gets flooded pretty quickly. It just seems natural to single out a user's activity just as it's natural to be able to filter out their posts and threads.

If add-ons can be tightly integrated with XF, it would make sense that they could also utilize such a feature and make it a much more social environment. Right now the news feeds don't feel connected, and I don't really know what a user likes or what they do unless I check the news feed and only the news feed.

A feature enhancement like this would encourage people to use what XenForo provides to the fullest extent. It's not like this feature is asking for something that isn't there, it's asking for something that's already there but to bring it out from the "back" of the room and stand in line with other prominent features that really bring out the social/community aspect XF is already known for.

 

[---MAD---]

Very well said ^.

 

[Floris]

Very well said ^.

Indeed +1

 

[Grover]

Indeed +1

Amen. I fully agree with everything Onimua is so cleary explaining.

 

[erich37]

If you put the activity-stream as in the screenshot (showing activities of a specific person), I agree this is fine and would be a nice add-on.

I am just concerned about creating an avtivity-stream showing ALL activity which is going on at a Forum with ability to post into that activity-stream.
That would be an issue as that would compete with the posts in the Forum and confuse people. That is what literally killed BuddyPress as users did not have a clue anymore whether they were posting into the activity-stream or into the forum.

But the feature as presented in the Screenshot is fine, I do agree with you it is a value-added information.

 

[---MAD---]

I don't see a need for commenting on user actions, you could always PM or write on their profile about their recent action if really necessary.