Hello Josh,

There's actually no particular reason behind it, we just felt that it makes sense if the user's own feed appears on the stream too. Otherwise, they can't see what they posted :P

This may be more of an issue than I had originally thought. There will be active members on my site who will contribute a lot of content (articles, forum posts, photos, ect). If they post a lot of content in a given day, they will see a lot of their own stuff in the friends part of the News Feed. This could reduce the user experience in terms of being able to easily find news from their friends. It's not just the fact that in some cases it bumps your friends content down, but makes it also mixed in. If you would like, I could generate some screen shots of what this scenario could look like. It's not just a possibility, but would be a certainty with how it's currently setup.

So here are a few solutions I thought of:

- Change "Me & Friends" to just "Friends" for the news feed. When viewing the "Friends Feed", if you post a status post it could temporarily show (for you, the poster) on that feed for X amount of minutes. Maybe 5 minutes? This way the user can clearly see their post went into the main feed that everyone else can see. This would also prevent other activities that you as the user did from getting in the way of you seeing your friends activity.

- Allow the Admin to decide what feeds to display. This option would require the need of a "Friends Feed" option (like my first proposal).

If either of these two solutions were added I'd be pretty happy on this situation. Personally I believe my first solution is better for everyone. But I gave a second one as a backup solution that would also be useful to site administrators.

Hello Josh,

To be frank with you, this is only applicable to niche sites like yours and if we ever were to implement this in EasySocial, it would affect everyone's stream behavior and I don't think that requiring another step for the user to view a list of combined feed would make sense.

I can't guarantee that this would be added but I would strongly suggest you post your ideas at http://stackideas.com/voices/ so others would also be able to vote on it

I'm with you that we want to make the users job as easy as possible (as well as the admins), simplicity is a big part in that. So forget the idea of an extra list. Lets keep it simple for the user/admin. This isn't about a special niche, I want to make sure the News Feed is using the best practices for displaying news to the user. So in this case I'm rooting for all of us to get the best usage of the stream data, and your the conductor who reviews if the logic is sound and creates for a better user experience.

The StackIdeas team decided to include "Me" in the "Friends" feed to fix the problem of not seeing your post as you post in the friends feed. In your own words "There's actually no particular reason behind it... Otherwise, they can't see what they posted".

The proposal I gave above was about making a work around for the issue of not seeing your posts when posted into the friends feed. We both know that it is important for the user to have confidence that their post went into the news feed. So the StackIdeas team countered this issue with a simple method of showing your post's too (the Me part). A respectable method. But better practices still could be used to counter the original issue and display only their friends activity without compromising your latest posts from being displayed.

The method I proposed was to have the "Me and Friends" feed be changed to a "Friends" feed and display your latest posts (not your latest activity). When making a post in the "Friends" feed, it could display for 10 minutes so that you (the poster) know it went in and everyone can see it. This method does not require any additional work for the user. I conducted a test on Facebook today that confirmed that they use a similar method to the one I'm proposing.

When I posted several test posts on the activity feed, for the first moment all the posts were there. After 3-8 minutes all the posts went off the feed. I don't think it's related to the number of friends I have (I have less than average on facebook). I'm not trying to get EasySocial to be like Facebook, but I am using them as an example of their method being quite successful of feed display. We the viewer are more curious about what others have posted than our own post. Am I correct on that statement? We can still view our own post on our profile. Right?

On Facebook this issue doesn't really occur because as you scroll down, it loads other people's post, not your own. But on EasySocial, even today I used a test profile (Darius) and saw the feed filled with Darius's post even though I did some tests from another user they were following. It's not that I can't view their post, but is that I have to do a lot more looking. Seeing "Darius logged in" and many other posts like it make it even more cluttered for me to view my friends activity. I already know that I logged in as Darius, so from my stand point it seems silly to see this in the very top of the feed (Me & Friends). Log in to the EasySocial demo and you will see this right away.

The method I'm proposing is simple, but I explained in lengthy detail because I wanted to give you some more insight on why. I don't want to hijack EasySocial to meet my own needs. I do however believe EasySocial should use the best methods when ever possible. The biggest reason for this proposal is for the sake of simplicity for the user, to shine the idea of easy use for socializing.

I attached a screen shot showing exactly what I'm proposing. The parentheses statement is just to show how long it would display in that feed. Be sure to see how the feed list is setup on the left too (which is almost the same as it currently is).

Thanks for the input here Josh. I would strongly suggest that you submit your request over at http://stackideas.com/voices/ . Since it is powered by the community, I guess it makes more sense to request for votes there

When formatting is added/allowed, I plan on adding it there. Showing a screen shot is very important in giving the user a good idea of what it is.

Josh, currently we do not plan on supporting attachments on voices. We want to keep it as simple as possible If you have a screen shot, you should use screen cast to take a snap of it and place the link there

I understand the attachment deal. But what about supporting either specific HTML elements or BBcode? This way images can be inserted (sourced from another location) into the post. Image Links "work" but having it display right away is a lot nicer.

Nope, not at all. We are strictly using markdown for the voices Let's just say we are really sick with bbcode / wysiwyg because they are never meant to be easy

I wasn't suggesting an editor Mark. I was talking about accepting the real code (ideally HTML). This way if a user happened to know how to insert an image they could put in.

Accepting HTML also means that it needs to be processed with a html parser and that also means that the editor should support it