Forums » Suggestions & Development Discussion » Photos and Friends

I had a few ideas that are pretty small, but might improve the already-great RPR experience.

First, when I'm at my home page, and it tells me that one of my friends posted a photo to their character, I can click on the photo as if it's a link... And it takes me to that character's main page. It's slightly annoying, and it would be nice to just be able to link directly to the full photo instead of having to go the character's page first.

Also, I was wondering what the point of having someone friend you is if you're not friends with them too. When I received a friend request, I had the option to "accept" it, and "friend them back." This seemed kind of odd. Why not just accept and then us be mutually friends? I think the purpose is if someone wants to follow the other person, they "friend" them first, but then they have to click another box that allows them to follow said person. Perhaps we could change it into two different options? One would be a "Friend" option, where you can send the person a request to be friends, and each follow the other, and then just a "Follow" option, where you can be alerted of the other person's activity without being friends with them?

That's just my opinion on things.

Thanks for reading!

~Oaky

I like this idea a lot and it's silly that it isn't like this already. I have added it to the official development task list. Vote it up!
Friends automatically "follow" one another, so there's no need to click an additional box to get notifications about your friends. The extra click is if you DON'T want to know about them.

This is an artifact of when there was no choice about getting notifications about your friends. When you were friends, you just did. Being able to stop watching but remain friends is quite new in the life cycle of RPR. Although it's a bit odd now that you can do both, the system is so deeply entrenched in how everything else operates it would be far more trouble than it's worth to change. I'd much rather spend the time on things that would make a more substantial difference to people's RPR life.

Thanks for your comments and thoughts!

I often get a lot of friend requests from people who want to keep tabs on my activity. I don't mind, but the problem is that if I friend them back, I'd have too much activity in my feeds that will drown out more important things!

By being able to allow them to friend me, but not friend them back, they can track everything I do, and I can keep my notifications nice and clean with the information I'm interested in! It's very useful to me.

And as Kim said, the connection is established immediately, but while accepting you can choose whether you want to track them or not. There's no extra click involved.

However, I can see maybe a redesign of the Friends management page for players to be a viable upgrade. I can imagine it looks confusing when this concept above isn't entirely clear. Big lists also require extra scrolling, because usually every member is listed twice (unless you didn't friend them back). An overhaul would be nice. (Is there a dev task for it yet? I can't seem to find an appropriate one)

I think the point of the question was that this isn't actually true. You can friend someone and choose to get no notifications about them. Through my response I was trying to illustrate that this USED to be true, and that's why the system is still the way it is.

The dev task that would cause what you're talking about to happen is the redesign here: http://www.rprepository.com/development/developmentTask.php?task=183

It just also includes a whole lot of other things, too.

Wow, you guys responded fast!

I appreciate the explanations about the friends thing, that makes a lot more sense.

I also voted up the picture idea!


Thanks,

~Oaky