Follow mechanic

I was looking but I don’t think I could find a “friend” or “follow” feature here. like a feature where I can follow or “friend” a favorite poster, and see their latest posts/threads. I hope the poster wouldn’t need to know if I’m following him or not; so there’s less social anxiety or whatever.

at the moment, I guess I can just bookmark the posters. but I was just wondering if there was something simpler or easier that already exists.

well, it’s not too bad to bookmark posters.

It’s a lot of bookmark tabs though. that’s only like a few of them. :laughing:

but yeah. it’s not a hassle to bookmark, I guess.

now you all might start laughing and pointing fingers at me, but hear me out. :disappointed_relieved:
it would be cool if we had a some feature where we could:

see the latest posts of people who we “follow” or “friend.”

It’s like how we get notification for threads, but instead we get notifications of our friend’s/following’s posts.

  1. with this feature, the forum would be a lot more social because people would be able to respond to other people who they relate to, instead of scrolling through thread titles that might or might not be relative. the forum is like a party with a lot of people :sunglasses:, so this feature would be like going into that party and being able to talk with your friends, eh? :wink: :dark_sunglasses:

  2. moreover, we can grow stronger bonds among people who we relate to. we can see if they’ve been posting recently and how they are doing. for example, @plumber popped by the other day, but I almost missed his visit. If I had a notification about his thread or post, I probably wouldn’t have to worry though. I also had no idea that @Supermanslice was still around, but apparently he is! stay cool bro!

  3. a measure to prevent abuse of this feature is already being used: the Muted feature. if someone follows me, and keeps replying to my posts; I wouldn’t be able to notice if I’ve muted that user.

oh baby! this is looking too good to be true, if a programmer was reading this, eh? :wink: :dark_sunglasses:

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another optional cool thing would be to have a Friends/Following category along with this feature…? kind of like this:

so instead of looking in our little notification box, we can just click that “Following” thing and bam! obviously, this is not necessary. :smile:

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I know you all are busy celebrating New Year’s; but I just wanted to beef up some persuasive defense for my proposal and advertise this idea, when someone does get the chance to read it. enjoy new year’s though and don’t read this post until maybe a week from now. :smiley:

but if this feature (or something similar) is already available, then someone please tell me about it. I feel like it already is, and I’m just not smart enough to find it. :disappointed:

That functionality is not available in the Discourse forum software that this forum uses.

Since the discussions on the forum are organized by topic threads, it’s not immediately clear to me how “following” a user would be a useful feature. Just reading a user’s posts without reading the topic threads associated with those posts would be confusing.

If you’re interested in a particular user’s activity on the forum, you can go to their profile and look at their posts that way.

Note that you can “watch” or “track” categories, but not users, by setting up your profile preferences accordingly. The only profile preferences you can set up related to users is the “mute” function which suppresses all notifications from the users you specify.

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now I can’t argue with a mod, can I? :wink: :dark_sunglasses:

well that’s a relief. for a second, I thought I was just too stupid to find that mechanic. but now I know it doesn’t exist. :smiley:

If Discourse doesn’t have the feature; then it can’t be helped I suppose. but yeah, my bookmarks are getting quite a lot…

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i guess I don’t understand what the benefit is for you to bookmark forum member’s profiles. Are you wanting to solely read some forum members posts and not others?

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no. I just want to have a closer bond with some posters. that’s all. there are some posters here who I can have an intense and friendly conversation with. they are quite cool. and I want to keep tabs on them. probably my paranoia or something. :stuck_out_tongue:

a lot of social websites have a “Friend”/ “Follow” feature though, so I can’t be too off my rockers, eh? :thinking:

A forum is not like twitter, facebook, etc. where random things are posted.

A forum is, by definition, a different construct. The posts are grouped as a common conversation in a topic thread. Following a user’s posts disconnected from the topic threads wouldn’t be very useful.

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