Iām trying to follow my friend PixelatedTrauma , and I canāt find out how to. I think this feature would be useful so you could easily check an userās page to see their posts, but in addition, a following feed would be really neat, so you can check what your following has posted without manually checking their posts. Also, follows can create competition or just be a friendly gesture.
Iām not sure the search function works either. Iām trying to search up the names of users who I know are on this forum, and it shows up as a blank. This is one of the reasons I thought a follow feature would be handy.
Other than these few things, I think the developers on this forum did a really nice job. It will obviously need some time to get used to since weāre all most likely facing a brand new forum, but at least it looks much better than the other Vainglory forums.
Thereās a bit of a delay before things get updated in the database ā¦ the user list, for instance, doesnāt yet reflect all the new people whoāve joined this afternoon. It will get updated over the next few hours, however, then youāll be able to search for your friends.
Where one of the core devs basically says he doesnāt see what problem it solves for forums - his point is that primarily forums are about reading and information not personalities.
I think he is right, but it misses the social side of things and that following particular people can be an efficient way of getting the information you are interested in quickly.
I can definitely see his point, but in my personal opinion, I think forums is also a good way to make friends, therefore thereās got to be some personality involved. The following feature would be a nice stepping stone to making a new friend, or just more interaction. I also believe as I said in my original post, it can cause ācompetitionā and you can try to make quality posts in order to get more followers. You can see examples of this in the forums ran by SEMC. The people that write quality threads naturally have more followers that write threads that have little detail. I know itās all up to the developers of Discourse to decide if they want a following feature and it seems unlikely due to their posts, but one can hope!