I've read a lot of topics criticising the activity stream feature and I find it utterly unuserfriendly as well. What was the logic behind this change? It seems like a case where someone was trying to fix something that already worked and made it worse. Like Microsoft and the whole Windows 8 debacle.

Activity stream may be useful for a low traffic board and works on Facebook where you only get certain "posts" in your stream. But what is the point of having an activity stream on a high traffic board? It's so clumsy at what it should be doing.

Instead of letting you know which topics have new posts so you can get up to date, you face an endless stream of new posts (often from one and the same topic).

Basically what I'm asking si how the h**** should I be using this feature to help me browse the board? It obviously isn't doing its job properly but I'll allow the possibility that I'm just not using it as it was intended.

Can anyone help me understand this thing better? And why we can't simlpy have a choice of both (the old new content list and activity stream)? This way it just seems it was forced onto users.

Edited January 3, 20169 yr by Tomzl

MY users are asking something similar. They want an easy way to find threads they have posted in which contain new content. I think it can be done with the activity feed but I am not sure exactly how. I linked my users to the feed and one said this to me "it's not notifying me of new posts.  This just shows me where I've posted in the past. "

There's very active sites that love it. Admittedly, some that don't as well. Perhaps you can outline specifics in terms of what you'd like to see or what would help the user experience and get the most from the AS. I know for some, the gut reaction is "give us the old way." Let's move past that for a moment and focus on the modern content discovery system that's in place now. What specifically makes it feel "clumsy?" When you reference pagination are you literally meaning you want to click page 6 (and if so, why?) or are you mostly wanting to maintain browser navigation, ie: click a topic, then click back to return to your place in the stream. In the case of the latter, we are working on just that and improving the overall flow of following through the stream. In the case of old-school pagination as in click page 6 -- we've tested different methods and all lead to significant performance overhead given how the stream works. My sense is, you don't really care about arbitrary page numbers, but instead want to maintain your place in the stream (correct me if I'm wrong and please do indicate why) -- in which case, we believe this will be doable.

I'm very anxious for further feedback on this, but let's please keep the focus on the AS -- we're nowhere near the point of considering a "VNC Throwback" feature at this juncture. Tell us what would make the AS perfect for you and what your top issues are, specifically. 

Thanks as always.

The issues I have are:

• Lack of pagination (slight annoyance)
• 'Load more activity' being displayed at the 'end' of the stream, when you hit it you get 'There's no more activity to display ', if at the end of a loop with less that the loop internal quantity to display surely it should display that immediately at the end of that data segment without the user having to click on the button again only to display the message? (feels unfinished)
• [This site] Charles posted a blog entry.... (major annoyance which seems to be being overlooked)
• Unread Content links take you to the first page of the thread instead of the last read or new comment of the thread. (major annoyance - which I know is under investigation / consideration )

You did ask.....

Edited January 3, 20169 yr by tekguru

That's great news!

Ditto here, no corruption.

@Lindy, I appreciate the offer. I sent you a personal message with the support ticket number. It's just been frustrating on my end because the previous upgrade errors that have seriously impacted my community, and there have been two of them, I've had to go through multiple support tickets on each problem before anyone would actually investigate the problem. It was only after a second IPS Support staffer looked at these problems that they discovered that there were actually errors with the upgrade. I let my frustration get the better of me but that we shouldn't have to submit multiple tickets before someone actually looks at the problem. However, logging in, repeating the same actions I took to reproduce the errors is not looking into the problem because it doesn't solve the problem.

I went through the support tool, updated to 4.1.6.1 and even restored the default forum template but that the error persisted. I know that the error is not with forum template because if the error was with the forum template, then the error would be reproducing itself when creating a customized activity stream through the front end user account. Like I said, the error only appears when a customized link is created through the ACP. I just found it odd that the error only appears if the customized link is created through the admin control panel.

 

We have some cool ideas for the AS that we think should solve most of your concerns, including those mentioned here. On the fly filtering may be one thing. We're not going to do pagination (as in navigate to page 4) as it just doesn't fit technically into the backend of the content discovery module.... but, we are working on navigation and you will be able to click a topic in the stream, hit back and pick up where you left off. I get the sense that's what most want with "pagination" so we'll start there. 

That's not months out by any means and should be relatively soon. Virtually any example given regarding "it doesn't do what VNC did" has been successfully refuted. It is every bit as powerful as VNC and then some - I think there's just general confusion on how to use it to its full potential and we need to make a few improvements to make it more intuitive. 

Thanks for the tangible, bullet list feedback - it's very helpful.

Any idea of when this is coming? How about a "read more" in the stream that opens the full content with reply and like ability so we don't even have to leave the stream? Like FB. You can interact right there. You leave and come back and it's all different but that's why you interact there. On IPS we can't interact in the stream, nor can we return to our last place. It's frustrating. Is there an ETA?

It probably needs a better solution than the back button. That's a lot of clicks if you replied to something. How about a "Return to stream" link? Click title, read, reply, click to return.

Stream interaction would be great, maybe something for 4.2.

Edited February 6, 20169 yr by chilihead

Returning to the result you left off at after you have loaded activity and clicked to read.

Edited April 30, 20168 yr by chilihead

 

Not in 4.1.17? So bad

A pity as being able to select the subforums for the activity stream is a must for some communities. But while this is in revision, I have to say that the capacity of excluding subforums (rather than adding them in) would be even better, particularly when you consider some communities have many subforums and only a few of these are generally the ones people need to leave out. That's the way it's been in previous versions of IPB when it came to New Content too.