cash wrote on 41371747-11-20

I have seen that other sn applications make this configurable:

• reciprocal: yes/no
• confirmation: yes/no

I definitely agree that the current solution is poor.

Milestone changed to Elgg 2.0 by brettp on 41609859-09-12

ewinslow wrote on 41734239-01-28

It occurred to me that "friends" as it exists in Elgg currently is closest to "People in my Circles" on Google+. That sort of convinces me that the current implementation is actually quite useful, and does not need to be forced to be reciprocal, nor do we need a separate followers plugin.

It's just that the name "friend" is really confusing, and this name is baked into so many parts of the system that it would be pretty hard to replace it with something else.

Milestone changed to Future Release by cash on 41762098-05-09

Milestone changed to Long Term Discussion by cash on 41921893-12-02

ewinslow wrote on 42388228-03-20

Had another thought -- we could add a standard "follow(er/ing/s)" relationship which would be used to determine what shows up in a user's river. In this sense, users can follow anything -- more than just other users. They could follow ("Subscribe to") a blog post to get updated about new comments/discussion. By default, friending someone would cause you to follow that person, but these two relationships wouldn't necessarily be as intertwined as they are now.

Upgrades for old sites would entail adding a follow relationship for every existing friend relationship.

As stated in #3444 (comment), I don't think we need to do this anymore.