Activity streams - new and followed content

[roddy]

The old new / followed content views are now merged into 'Activity Streams'. I haven't quite figured these out myself yet, but they do seem quite powerful. You could have one stream of new content by specific people (say, people you know are going to the same uni as you next year), comments to your blog entries, new topics in a specific forum, etc. 

The default streams available are under activity > my activity streams. You can choose one default stream which appears on the right hand side - by default it's unread content, but if you click the tick mark next to a stream title (ie, Content I follow ) that will become your default and take its place.

The Content I Follow streams seem empty at the moment, but that's just while the database catches up with itself. You can see here that the information hasn't been lost.

[Guest realmayo]

I don't know if I'm unusual in this, but the page I tended to go to was the 'show unread content' or 'recent activity' or something like that.

The new equivalent page, even in 'condensed' view, shows also each instance of someone liking a topic and I wonder whether giving a line for each such notification there might end up clogging the page up once the forums are back up to full speed?

[Apollys]

Looks good to me?

[roddy]

Are you looking at 'All activity'? That's quite possible, but there's also Unread Content, which doesn't show that activity, and the option of customising your own streams. 

Apollys - that looks like a customised feed you've made based on Unread Content - which is grand, but it might not be the same thing realmayo sees.

[Guest realmayo]

Oh you're right, I did Unread content and then told it to include read content. Now got my previous preferences recreated.

[Apollys]

Yeah, I just selected Topics only and pressed save, then click the check mark at the top left and bam! - you've got yourself a nice default stream.

[Guest realmayo]

By the looks of it you can only navigate (from the activity stream page) to the first page of a topic, which is annoying very slightly vexing.

Edit: this doesn't apply to topics with unread posts.

[roddy]

Yeah, I'm not keen on that.

[lechuan]

Is it possible to turn off the "USERNAME started following...." every time someone responds to a thread for the first time? Takes up quite a bit of vertical space.

[roddy]

Done. It's basically redundant as 99% of the time it's because they're posting, as you say. 

[roddy]

@abcdefg sounded a little confused by the Activity Streams and he's probably not the only one, not entirely figured them out myself. But...

 

As you can see you get a number of default streams. Most pertinent are probably 'Unread Content', which is basically what we used to have under 'New', and 'Followed Content', but there are also options for content you've started, content you've posted in. In our case 'content' is effectively just topics, as that's all we really have. But blog posts would show up there too.

 

You can select any Activity Stream (default or custom) as your personal default, and that's what you see a link to on the right hand side. To change it, use the checkbox next to the Activity Stream title. Click the really small image below.

 

What about Custom Streams. Have a look at the options...argh, I had an annotated image but it looks like I didn't save it. Never mind, have a look at the page and they should be fairly understandable. 

 

And here's what it might look like if I wanted to have one stream of everything abcdefg posts in the Food forum.

 

Once I've saved that it turns up under Custom Streams, and I could make it my default if I wanted. There's also a formatting error with the apostrophe in the title, so I'll be bug reporting that right away... I can also share it via the link so others can view it.

 

And if you are abcdefg himself, you could limit it to topics you've started, as opposed to topics you've participated in and save the changes (I assume that as this is 'my' stream which I've shared with you, you'd only have the option to save as a new stream, rather than overwrite mine). 

 

Other possible uses - perhaps you're interested in people who do dictionary / Chinese language processing stuff, so you set up a feed for anything posted by imron, mikelove, etc. Maybe you live in Beijing and are only really interested in grammar, so you set up a feed for those two forums. Etc. Or maybe you just use the default Unread Content stream, but you get annoyed with all the Tattoo and Chinese name questions, so you filter that forum out and make a new default for yourself, then post a link in case anyone else wants to use it.