Forum Discussion

keithkelly's avatar
keithkelly
Leader
2 years ago

Following Specific Users - Anyone built a customization (or is this available in Aurora)?

We launched our External Beta, and one of our first questions was "Can we follow specific users?"

My first reaction:

the "Subscribe to a Person" feature (on many other communities) drives contribution to a new level.  When a person has a following, they contribute more quality stuff more often. 

A) Will this be available in Aurora?

B) Has anyone built this as a customization?

 

    • keithkelly's avatar
      keithkelly
      Leader
      2 years ago
      StanGromer wrote:

      Did you see the one Khoros themselves built in Atlas (but it's for themselves, not customers ğŸ˜” )

      Let me find a different gif for that...

       

      Alright I friended you too. 

       

      It looks like it only shows notifications for new topics started by you.  That's fine - at least a big step forward.

       

      Dear khoros is this something that can be enabled? 

      • cblown's avatar
        cblown
        Boss
        2 years ago

        Hey keithkelly 

        We've had a crack at this a few times over the years working on Khoros / Lithium.

        AFAIK its not possible directly with the APIs. For what its worth, I suspect the  core message database structure / relationship doesn't lend itself to scaling this type of query very well. 

        Sorry I can't recall the exact details but it went something like this (this is rough and glosses over some technical limitations).

        1. Setup an event subscription on Message create 
        2. Set the callback to an external service that captures the message details, its ID and the user ID (author) into a simple DB. 
        3. Using the Friends API fetch a list of user ID that are the members "friends"
        4. Query your remote DB via a REST endpoint (using http.client) which can return a list of recent message IDs for each user ID.  (get the endpoint to handle  sorting so it can group the data by user or make it one long newest to oldest feed)
        5. Using the JSON from it and http.client create a customer component that generates a summary message list that includes the real world URL to the message / topics.   

        The main issues are; 

        1. Lots of work to get this going, which arguably should be OOTB. 
        2. You probably need to figure out if messages are new post vs. replies
        3. You probably need to cache this to make it faster and then manage the cache refreshing somehow

        Chris