Operation Audacious Phoenix

I had a weird thought the other day when I was following along a character's guestbook RP exchange with another character. I looked to see if I could 'subscribe' to the characters and have their notifications appear on my Home feed when they posted. It works with public characters of the accounts I tick the box to follow their characters, but these are anonymous characters carrying on an RP in a guestbook. It appears there is no way to subscribe to anonymous characters, and I have to go and check to see if anythng new has been posted.

I could see it being a bit of a chore to impliment, but I'll ask if this could be looked at? If this already exists, then I must not be aware on how to do it.

The way it "exists" right now is by having one of your characters form a relationship with that character.

But an option to "follow" a character has definitely been a request for like... eight years. I will see what I can do about it this go-around! There are still a lot of decisions about how to write notifications up in the air, that will have an impact on how easy/fast/impossible other things are.

So it's not a concern of mine, but I have seen people express concerns that knowing someone might "follow" their character would give them anxiety. I don't know how reasonable it would be to allow people a way to opt out but there are those who would appreciate it (and those who would probably be frustrated when they can't "follow" this or that character).

Hmmmn, good point. Yet more to mull over!

I echo Novalyyn, this is a concern I have myself! I like being able to control who can and can't follow my anonymous characters. Maybe if it could be disabled by the user who owns the characters, it would be okay...? Like an opt-in feature so it's not the default.

Could this be remedied by changing a character you don't want strangers to subscribe to from anon to Friends only?

Or could this be more like a friend request? Where you can choose to decline or accept the request?

Thanks for giving it consideration Kim.

I didn’t think this sort of feature would be such a concern. I don’t know how much coding effort would need to go into providing an ‘Allow Subscriptions’ yes/no selection, or a simpler default on with a ‘Disable Subscriptions’ tick in the character setup/edit screen somewhere to opt out. That way anyone can disable the feature if they are anxious about such things.

I suppose the twitter model could work here. A 'private' toggle the player can enable that prevents following -- or pops up with a notification that X and Y want to follow this character: approve, disapprove. I think that could run nicely in conjunction the existing connections feature you guys built where you have to accept/reject connections.

Given the fact that this would mostly be of benefit only for following anonymous characters, I don't personally see a lot of issues with it if one or two of the suggested safeguards are built in that would allow the player of the character to accept or decline such subscriptions, either manually for each one or with a selectable setting, possibly even both being options if a player doesn't mind the idea but wants to be selective about who does.

Or as one person suggested, one of the options could be for allowing only friends to do such a thing--though this could potentially come with another problem of their friends using this feature to accidentally or deliberately figure out who controls this anonymous character.