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WARNING: Do NOT convert Friends to Followers when upgrading! And the need for better follow settings.


ehku

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Posted

Hello,

I enabled Convert friends to followers when upgrading from 3.4.7. Guess what I got? See below.

backgroundprocess.thumb.png.ac4369aeab5b

The problem with the new system is that, if you are following someone, you will get a notification of any content posted by that member (any content, including topics, posts, comments, status updates, etc...). So if I had 1000 friends in 3.4.7, that means I'm having 1000 followers in IPS 4.0, and everytime I post something, there are 1000 notifications to be sent. And I'm not the only one who post things, certainly!

This is, I believe, the origin of many background processes of my forum, as shown above. 

Now it's to late for me to revert the conversion, I have to find another solution. I have asked all the members not to authorise followers but of course this is just a short-term solution. That would be great if there is a way to mass unfollow (or unfollow all) people.

If anybody has an idea, please share it.

In addition, I would like to suggest a feature for IPS 4.0: Options to choose what to follow from the member. We have an option for status update (same as in version 3), but that's not sufficient.

noti.thumb.png.51eb853c3e8bf926db81df1cf

Thanks.

 

 

Posted

 

Oh boy.... What a mess. Probably best explains the difference between friends and followers. One is a user's private permission setting and the other just a notification system Without more control (such as setting what type of events you will follow such as forum posts but not images), this will be a torrent if you follow just a handful of active members. All email notification should be able to be turned off by default (don't think you can right now in IPS 4 can you?) and your notifications will look like a small community's activity stream. Until "follow" can be broken down to more discrete settings, probably best not to follow anyone.

 

Posted

Can we just bring back friends already? I really want to see my friends in the friend list again. I love seeing their faces in the little thumbnails.  If we bring back friends we can start fresh with followers and avoid this entire mess. Both can co-exist.

Posted

Either friends need to be brought back or we need more individual follow settings for each account we follow.

​Agree. That, actually, is my suggestion above.

Posted

​^This! I may want to follow JOHN DOE's files but not interested in his topics, etc. Good idea!

Either friends need to be brought back or we need more individual follow settings for each account we follow.

Can we just bring back friends already? I really want to see my friends in the friend list again. I love seeing their faces in the little thumbnails.  If we bring back friends we can start fresh with followers and avoid this entire mess. Both can co-exist.

 

Oh boy.... What a mess. Probably best explains the difference between friends and followers. One is a user's private permission setting and the other just a notification system Without more control (such as setting what type of events you will follow such as forum posts but not images), this will be a torrent if you follow just a handful of active members. All email notification should be able to be turned off by default (don't think you can right now in IPS 4 can you?) and your notifications will look like a small community's activity stream. Until "follow" can be broken down to more discrete settings, probably best not to follow anyone.

 

​So I take it nobody here has seen this mod..... @ehku

I was concerned about this myself and my users were worried about it. But the mod above does exactly what I need for it to do personally until IPS makes these features apart of the core. And please...do not bring friends back. A lot of good features have been implemented( such as the follower users) and I don't want to see them reneged simply because people just don't like them and want to stay with dated features (friends) :) I think most of us do like the followers concept, IPS just needs to implement Kevin's mod's features into core and we'll be happy(most of us).

Posted

Collecting followers is fun, but it's not the same as friends. I don't know why people thought there was enough overlap to kill friends entirely. I would have liked to see friends system improved and have approval based friend-ing

Posted

​So I take it nobody here has seen this mod..... @ehku

I was concerned about this myself and my users were worried about it. But the mod above does exactly what I need for it to do personally until IPS makes these features apart of the core. And please...do not bring friends back. A lot of good features have been implemented( such as the follower users) and I don't want to see them reneged simply because people just don't like them and want to stay with dated features (friends) :) I think most of us do like the followers concept, IPS just needs to implement Kevin's mod's features into core and we'll be happy(most of us).

​Yes, I saw and use it. How many IPS clients do you think that comes to this forum and download things ? Someone from IPS already said: 5% to 10%. Imagine how many will be pissed off with thousand notifications on a week ? This HAS to be a default feature.

Posted

​Yes, I saw and use it. How many IPS clients do you think that comes to this forum and download things ? Someone from IPS already said: 5% to 10%. Imagine how many will be pissed off with thousand notifications on a week. This HAS to be a default feature.

​While the first thing I did upon upgrade was unfollow everyone I had ever had as a friend, thus I sympathize, if this is actually going to be an issue for the majority, no posts need be made about it here. Clients will blow up the client center with the feedback on this issue, and it will be changed. Ranting about it here is not going to help, really.

Posted

​While the first thing I did upon upgrade was unfollow everyone I had ever had as a friend, thus I sympathize, if this is actually going to be an issue for the majority, no posts here need be made about it here. Clients will blow up the client center with the feedback on this issue, and it will be changed. Ranting about it here is not going to help, really.

Agreed. One other item that may help deal with this issue because users may choose to follow. (1) Follow feature made unavailable; and/or (2) ​Notification by email MUST be off right now. By default, it appears new users also get email notification. Not sure if there is a way to set defaults for notifications globally. If not, get ready for users to complain about spam and then have your emails bounce by ISP or go right to the spam box.

Posted

Agreed. One other item that may help deal with this issue because users may choose to follow. (1) Follow feature made unavailable; and/or (2) ​Notification by email MUST be off right now. By default, it appears new users also get email notification. Not sure if there is a way to set defaults for notifications globally. If not, get ready for users to complain about spam and then have your emails bounce by ISP or go right to the spam box.

​From what I've seen you post, it does appear that you need to use your eyes more. You can set notification defaults in 3.x and in 4.x. (It's even featured in the screenshot in the first post)

Posted

​While the first thing I did upon upgrade was unfollow everyone I had ever had as a friend, thus I sympathize, if this is actually going to be an issue for the majority, no posts here need be made about it here. Clients will blow up the client center with the feedback on this issue, and it will be changed. Ranting about it here is not going to help, really.

So can't we express our dissatisfaction here? Do we have to sit ,accept everything and wait for the client center blow up? Do I have to remove 350 friends on my board like I did by removing 120 here on IPS ? Do I have to add them again later when the client center blew up and things change? Is this a reasonable thing to do? Bad decisions has a price. I've seen a lot lately.

Posted

​While the first thing I did upon upgrade was unfollow everyone I had ever had as a friend, thus I sympathize, if this is actually going to be an issue for the majority, no posts need be made about it here. Clients will blow up the client center with the feedback on this issue, and it will be changed. Ranting about it here is not going to help, really.

​This doesn't even make sense. The OWNER of IPB reads what we write here and engages with us. How is it not appropriate to voice feedback here?

Posted

​From what I've seen you post, it does appear that you need to use your eyes more. You can set notification defaults in 3.x and in 4.x. (It's even featured in the screenshot in the first post)

Being deliberately obnoxious is really not a good trait. 

The screenshot in the first post refers to "posts a new status". That's not what I'm talking about. And if it is, then you and whomever decided to use that language clearly need to get around online more often because a "user status" is often used to describe the status a user sets about the way they feel, e.g. "I'm happy" or "I'm sad" or "I'm feeling obnoxious."

Perhaps what you meant to say is that the control is in the same area in the Admin CP. You should use your eyes more often...

PS - This should be set not to email by default by INSTALLATION of IPS - not leaving this to administrators to set only after they discover the problem like it is now. 

Posted

I never said it was not appropriate. There is already a lengthy topic on this discussion. Both topics are spinning in circles. I was simply trying to calm some of you down that act like this is the end of the world.

​License holders has rights to start thousand topics if they wish... and I bet even more topics will appear when more people starts to update their boards.

Posted

Might be useful for people who are in the same situation as me: I removed all followers for all members in the database:

DELETE FROM ibf_core_follow WHERE follow_area='member';

Regards.

Posted

Might be useful for people who are in the same situation as me: I removed all followers for all members in the database:

DELETE FROM xxx_core_follow WHERE follow_area='member';

Regards.

​1. You may want to remove your prefix.

2. If you remove all followers from the database, you're stuck with no Friends or Followers at all. This means that if your users had 40 friends that they still wanted to have some connection, they would need to do this all over again. That may tick off your users.

Perhaps you can suppress email notifications for member-based follow content instead. I don't see any control for what vBulletin calls "subscribed threads" so that you can keep users "following" the threads they have subscribed to receive notification but suppress email for all other activities that encompasses a "follow" of a user.

Posted

I am already having trouble to understand this dysfunctional feature...

We have to have some kind of control or members have to have that control too...

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