All About Activity Streams
Most of us are accustomed to activity streams (or newsfeeds) from popular applications such as Facebook and Twitter. We have something akin to that here at FanficTalk. Since it doesn't work identically to more-familiar applications, let's run over some information about it.
What is an activity stream? Simply put, it's a stream or list of activity that occurs on the forums. Each activity has certain properties (what type of activity it is, time it happened, whether it was posted by someone you follow, whether you have read it or not, and many more). This enables the activities to be filtered into different streams according to those properties.
Default Activity Streams. There are several activity streams that are included by default. They are mostly self-explanatory.
- All Activity - this is a list of everything (posts, status updates, blog entries, reactions, profile photo changes, follows, etc)
- All Unread Content - similar to All Activity but only what you haven't read yet
- Content I Started
- Content I Follow
- Content I Posted In
- Members I Follow
Site-Specific Default Activity Streams. In addition to the above, we also have set several site-specific activity streams to appear for all members.
- Status Updates - this is a collection of status updates. Because this is interest, it has a separate link in the main menu. The 10 most recent can be viewed in a sidebar on the main page.
- Recent Posts - this is a collection of posts from around the forums (excluding a few boards such as NaNo rat races and common rooms). The 5 most recent can be viewed in a sidebar on the main page.
- Recent CR Posts - posts from common rooms. You will see only your own CR posts. If you're a Muggle, you will not see any. The 5 most recent can be viewed in a sidebar on the main page.
- Recent Blog Entries - a list of blog entries and comments left on them. The 5 most recent entries (not comments) can be viewed in a sidebar on the main page.
Personal Activity Streams. You can also create your own activity streams that will appear only for you, should you find you want something more specific than the options described above. For example, perhaps you want a stream of all activity with the "fantastic beasts" tag or all activity posted by the member Dumbledore during the month of July . To create a personal activity stream:
- Go to "Activity Streams" in the main menu
- Go to "My Activity Streams" in the sub-menu
- Click "Create New Stream"
- In the box that appears, choose the options to your specifications. Note that some options have additional options/settings once you choose them. For example, once you pick topics as your content type, you can specify which forum(s) you want to include if you don't want to include all of them.
- Click Save Changes
- It will now appear in list of streams in the "My Activity Streams" sub-menu.
Condensed vs Expanded View. At the top right of each activity stream, you can toggle between expanded and condensed view. Condensed view essentially shows a summary of who has done what. Expanded view gives a preview of each activity. For example, with the status updates stream, in condensed view, you will only see that someone has posted a status update. In expanded view, you will be able to view the status update itself.
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