XenForo Beta6, very disappointed

[Allan]

I very disappointed when i read all modification in this thread.

Sure, there are interesting additions, but almost none of the important suggestions made by members.

What's going on ?

 

[Marc]

Although I disagree with the disappointment, I think its good everyone is having an opinion rather than people just being "I love xenforo" because I think its good for the Kier, Mike & xenforo to get every bit of feedback possible.

Personally I'm happy with the fact we're on beta 6 and glad you guys are taking your time introducing features that are being requested rather than trying to please everyone with every feature on the menu. I have no doubt xenforo will end up featurepacked (which IMO is not bloatware if done correctly), but I think you are going the right way about it.

Slow and steady wins the race ... A well known quote for very good reason.

 

[dieketzer]

I know that you want an infraction system and the ability to ignore users. You've made that abundantly clear. Repeatedly. Those features will come, but not before version 1.1. They are extensive features to implement properly and as such they have been de-prioritized in favour of features that actively help to build communities and generate content while always improving the user experience of the software.

im not too interested in an infraction system (authoritarian), but i do reckon xf needs a comprehensive ignore/block system. users having some sort of self-initiated recourse helps to build communities too.
btw i am pretty happy you are aware i have been pining for an ignore feature. i do believe this is the first time you have ever addressed an ignore function btw... thats what i have found so troubling.

As far as your comments on avatars and preventing following are concerned, I'm confused by both.

Preventing someone from following you? Why? What's the point? If you want privacy, use the privacy settings. There is no more data exposed by virtue of someone following you than they could find by viewing your profile page.

And an ability to hide avatars? Have you not noticed that user avatars are a fundamental design element for almost every page of the XenForo UI?

i wouldnt want to disable avatars globally, but there are certainly users that want to due to 'nsfw' issues. so this leaves me in the situation where i have to be the avatar police and field complaints about avatars that some users feel are nsfw. now i am having drama with two groups of people; those that want freedom to use nsfw avatars, and those that are in favour of a sfw avatar policy. it sure would be nice if i could instead tell ppl to turn off avatars while at the office hey

bear in mind, in the case of following youre preaching to the converted. but users arent understanding that 'your news feed (people i follow)' is over-ridden by 'people i follow' privacy settings. and perhaps they do want an open profile, but dont want to be followed by a particular person. they find the presence of trolls in their 'following me' box disconcerting. it sure would be nice if ppl could block others from following them. even if it technically does nothing under the hood, it would sure go a long way on the frontline.

 

[dieketzer]

I would love there to be both Modder made and XenForo made add-ons out there most of which I will not be interested in.

this is what i was hoping for in the beginning.
i knew xf would be pretty bare-bones in the beginning and thought it would be cool to have something 'modular' where i could add/remove official addons.
it would appease both the 'no bloat' and 'more features' crowds. it would also be a great way for a dev to see exactly which features were popular or not.

 

[Russ]

im not too interested in an infraction system (authoritarian), but i do reckon xf needs a comprehensive ignore/block system. users having some sort of self-initiated recourse helps to build communities too.
btw i am pretty happy you are aware i have been pining for an ignore feature. i do believe this is the first time you have ever addressed an ignore function btw... thats what i have found so troubling.

i wouldnt want to disable avatars globally, but there are certainly users that want to due to 'nsfw' issues. so this leaves me in in the situation where i have to be the avatar police and field complaints about avatars that some users feel are nsfw. now i am having drama with two groups of people; those that want freedom to use nsfw avatars, and those that are in favour of a sfw avatar policy. it sure would be nice if i could instead tell ppl to turn off avatars while at the office hey

bear in mind, in the case of following youre preaching to the converted. but users arent understanding that 'your news feed (people i follow)' is over-ridden by 'people i follow' privacy settings. and perhaps they do want an open profile, but dont want to be followed by a particular person. they find the presence of trolls in their 'following me' box disconcerting. it sure would be nice if ppl could block others from following them. even if it technically does nothing under the hood, it would sure go a long way on the frontline.

I feel you'd go in a very small majority of users on xenforo that would need a feature to avoid policing avatars. It's rather simple, we're on the internet people lay down rules and some break them. If you wanted to do a "SFW" no avatars.... create a new style and replace all the avatar holders with an image of a happy smiley face, would take probably 10 minutes

As for the ignore/block system I myself would never see a use for such a system as we're on a public forum board. In my eyes threads wouldn't make sense if some posts would be blocked because I ignored a user. Then again I don't know what exactly you'd like to see in that system, we do have privacy preferences as it is to limit what some folks see. I don't see how having an ignore/block system helps build communities more? But... I know this has been a popular feature among other boards.

Anywho... I'm a bit tipsy and just ranting

 

[Allan]

Good thread finally

 

[xenDach]

Hmm. I think I get dieketzers point with the follow function. There should be an option available to the user to moderate who follows them and also the ability to take some one out of the followers list. There definitely may come a time, when the association with a certain user isn't wanted and I believe, at the moment, there is no way to stop the association in Xen.

On the other hand, I disagree with the criticism of "an authoritarian approach", because simply, it is that way. An admin is and must be authoritive in a forum. He is the boss and must rule over the forum. If he or she doesn't do it, then someone else must, otherwise, the necessary discipline needed to keep the forum orderly will be missing. A forum must have rules, they must be fair, the users must obide by them and if they don't, the admin must react with certain concequence. Judgement is part of that reaction. There is no way to avoid that and just giving users an ignore function, although useful, will not truely solve unruly users being very annoying and disruptive. At some point the admin must be authorative and take action.

/edit - thinking further on this. It would be nice, once there was an ignore function in Xen, for the admin to see some statistics on who has been ignored how much recently. On a big forum that could be useful for the admin to pinpoint troublesome users fast.

xenDach

 

[FreshFroot]

I will look at adding some more, but I'm actually really unhappy with that system. It's quite a pain to put together.

Hi Mike, just wondering what you are referring too? You are wanting to introduce a new system to replace hooks in a better way?

Yes, I agree in principle, however, I remain disappointed with the additions made,there seems to have been done without taking into account members' suggestions
.

I have to agree with Shelly. I think the staff here WILL address these features.. but most likely when GOLD 1.0 is out.

I rather have a BUG free forum platform, before features are added. As we know features will basically introduce NEW possible bugs. The last thing we want is to introduce even more bugs now in the BETA stages.

Give it time my friend. We are VERY early off in XF's developement.

All goes well with those who wait or something like that.. LOL i forget the term now it's 1AM

. Adding new features at this early stage can introduce a whole set of problems that affect other functions throughout the software whilst potentially introducing new bugs. /quote]

Agreed!

 

[Paul B]

Hmm. I think I get dieketzers point with the follow function. There should be an option available to the user to moderate who follows them and also the ability to take some one out of the followers list. There definitely may come a time, when the association with a certain user isn't wanted and I believe, at the moment, there is no way to stop the association in Xen.

But as has already been stated, following someone doesn't expose any extra data which isn't already available in the main news feed.

With regards to profile privacy, just set it to "People You Follow Only", which is more or less the same as only allowing friends in Facebook to see your profile.

 

[xenDach]

My comment and I believe also dieketzer's concern is about the relationship or the association with the person following you and not necessarily about any data that might be shared.

BTW, you can block people who follow you on twitter. That is the same type of functionality missing in Xen. I am sure it will come, sooner or later.

xenDach

 

[Paul B]

BTW, you can block people who follow you on twitter. That is the same type of functionality missing in Xen. I am sure it will come, sooner or later.

If a member blocked everyone, none of their content would show up in the activity streams.
The logical extrapolation of that is to also block their posts from being seen; after all if you can read their posts, then what difference is it if you can also see their posting entries in the activity streams?

Which would then render threads worthless if there were lots of blocked posts.

If everyone did that your forum would , for all intents and purposes, be dead.

I just don't understand what the "blocking" function is supposed to do.

 

[Kier]

BTW, you can block people who follow you on twitter. That is the same type of functionality missing in Xen. I am sure it will come, sooner or later.

Not sure what the case for doing this actually is - you can bypass a Twitter block by simply logging out, which makes it seem completely and utterly pointless to me, unless the feature exists solely for the benefit of uneducated users who don't understand how useless it really is.

 

[xenDach]

Ok, let's say you have user X following you. At first you think, "No problem." But then over time, he (or she) starts to be a real community PITA and even tends to start to stalk you, hacking on your comments all the time. You can at least stop him from following you, by blocking your feeds into his news feed and when other users look at your followers, this PITA guy (or gal) isn't in the list anymore. The association is "blocked".

Obviously not everyone would block everyone. It just wouldn't happen, because most people want to be followed or don't mind being followed. But still there should be the freedom of choice.

xenDach

 

[xenDach]

@Kier - Then the function isn't correct in Twitter. Are you sure about that? That would make absolutely no sense what so ever.

xenDach

 

[Paul B]

So would your content also be blocked to this person?

If not then the 'block' achieves nothing except to remove him from your list of followers.
If it does, how would that work in threads?

 

[xenDach]

Hmm..interesting. I blocked you in Twitter Kier, trying out the function and thought I had reset the block. But now you are off my Followers list. Sorry.

xenDach

 

[xenDach]

@Brogan - the block or remove from followers list function wouldn't affect the ability to see your posts or threads, or even the ability for the "stalker" to go to your profile and see it (unless you had set it to "People you follow only"). The block or remove function is just to remove the person from the Followers list.

Scott

 

[Paul B]

In which case it's purely cosmetic, which is what I was trying to get to the bottom of.

 

[Floris]

Not sure what the case for doing this actually is - you can bypass a Twitter block by simply logging out, which makes it seem completely and utterly pointless to me, unless the feature exists solely for the benefit of uneducated users who don't understand how useless it really is.

Mark Z. was right though .. Piracy means nothing and people have to accept it.

It's the people who don't apply privacy - therefor there is none, regardless of the web apps providing them with privacy options.

"I never put my age up on facebook, so nobody knows how old I am", John Doe says.

To which I reply: "Then don't go to a community and post you turned 25 last week" ..

But I guess social engineering is therefor considered 'hacking'. I like to call it 'googling'.

 

[xenDach]

In which case it's purely cosmetic, as I thought.

You call it cosmetic, I call it freedom of choice and dieketzer calls it self-initiated recourse. Although dieketzer was also talking about an ignore function, which is completely another animal.

xenDach

 

[hescominsoon]

Don't mistake my post at getting on at you. That's not the intention. Adding new features at this early stage can introduce a whole set of problems that affect other functions throughout the software whilst potentially introducing new bugs. As stated above it's beta software, I find that them building upon existing features is the way forward. Long term this serves everyone's interests and that's how I'm looking at this.

The product is stable, very usable and personally I'm thankful for that because I know the long term they are building a strong foundation to build upon those features your wanting to see implemented. Not forgetting that when we have a sturdy foundation this also helps those devs/coders to build even better add-ons. For me it's a win win, it really is. Quality always beat out quantity.

yeah like getting cache rebuild fixed..