BuddyPress

Hello!

In the community I am building I am in need of this component, is it possible to convert the wire from 1.1.3 to 1.2.x? I was pretty disappointed that it was gone. This would be a great additional feature, and maybe if there is going to be a component – there could be an off and on switch whether you want the wire or not. This would be great, less users would be confused and a more interactive community. I am pretty sure most developers/users would agree that this feature is a must.

Thanks.

definitely a great feature!

Wow. judging from the forum posts; transitions to 1.2 is not smooth.. and many like the changes. cant wait for the next set of changes that will force me to redeploy my site again!

There have been very few posts concerning issues with 1.1-1.2 upgrades. On the whole I think is has gone very well. I think if you use the old theme (“BP Classic”) with the BP Backwards Compatibility plugin you can get the wire back.

What do you find the new activity sections do not do for your site that the wire did?

You cant post on somebody’s activity stream. Well you could @ them and it would show on their @’s same thing just different method

It’s gone from a Facebook “Wall” implementation to something like “Twitter.” You can’t go into my Twitter and leave a message, can you?

Oh facebook got ride of the old wall as well. It’s now more like twitter now. I think people are freaking out by not being able to go an post on the actual persons wall when in reality BP 1.2 has made it even easier by using mentions.

I have an author community with people older than 40 years and they want it as simple as possible. The wire was easier for them than the @ will be. We’re not the twitter-generation

To be fair, the Twitter and Facebook generation are all of about 3 years apart. If you can’t adapt quickly the internet is not going to be a very fun place for you.

@Modemlooper I have to say that’s a very inconvenient method of posting on someone’s activity stream though. It forces you to browse away from the user profile to be able to post a message into their activity stream. The average user will most likely just think it’s not possible to leave a comment.
A second, more important issue is that this method is inconsistent with the group-, site- and your own user page activity streams because those, contrary to the user page activity stream of a friend, do allow users to post message directly into them. The current implementation takes some elements from twitter and some from regular social network sites and applies them inconsistently. All in all this makes for a very confusing user experience.

I think a lot of these issues would be alleviated if the activity stream on the user page of a friend would have a text area near the top, consistent with those found on the site-, group- and your own user page activity streams. Messages posted through this method would automatically be preceded with an @ mention. This would apply the same user interaction method to all activity streams and yield a much more consistent user experience.

Groups are different, they show the activity for a group. If I post a message in the group it’s activity for that group, so it shows on the group activity stream. That’s why there is a box to post.

If there was a post box on every user’s page, where does that post go? It can’t go on that user’s activity stream because that stream is the activity for that user. If I post, that’s my activity, not theirs. That would be totally confusing.

The activity stream is not the wire. It’s an activity stream, it shows activity for a specific object (user/group). If you want the free-for-all wire functionality then you’ll need to install the back compat plugin, or see if someone is interested in remaking it as a plugin for 1.2.

@Andy But from a usability point of view this is very confusing. Some activity streams do allow you to post into them and some don’t. One method of posting into a user activity stream is allowed (replies) but another (leaving a direct comment) isn’t. From a developer point of view this might feel logical due to the underlying structure, but from a user point of view it’s very confusing. A user is forced to jump through all sorts of hoops just to be able to interact with a friend.

I don’t think it would be confusing for the user at all to allow their friends to post into their activity stream. They are, after all, already able to do this by replying to an activity. Allowing users to directly post into their friends activity stream would merely add consistency to the user interaction. It’s precisely how Facebook works and they seem to get along just fine.
On the other hand, the fact that in order to see a comment on your own profile you have to browse to someone else’s profile does feel very confusing, because it all of a sudden injects twitter style functionality into a specific subset of the buddypress user interaction which otherwise is more consistent with how the majority of other social networking sites work.

Andy, in Germany we have the word “Verschlimmbesserung”. It means, that something became complicated by trying to do it better. In my opinion the missing wire is a “Verschlimmbesserung”.
I tried the back compat plugin, but it’s easier to handle without it. So I would be glad if somebody could make a wire-plugin for 1.2.

Mentions is a good solution for this problem already, you could even make a textbox on a profile that automatically adds a mention off the user in front of the text. Could be an easy solution.

@Xevo You mean something like a ‘mentions stream ‘ on the user page, separate from the user activity stream?

Its the same as it was just go to a persons profile and click the mention this person button then post, that person will be notified.

It really is no different than before. The wall is now called @ Mentions on your profile.