Our Forum and Social Network Are Live!

Well it only took about four months longer than originally hoped(!), but our forum—together with or new social network features—is finally live! So what took so bloody long? Well the fact that I wanted to launch those social networking features at the same time accounts for about half that time, while the rest was spent fixing bugs, resolving software conflicts, and most importantly making everything on the site work seamlessly and consistently. This meant developing customised solutions for almost everything, but after extensive testing, I’m now confident enough to release it all to the public. A detailed explanation of the new features awaits after the jump.

The forum: for an explanation of the forum’s features, see here.

The social network: the thing that really makes a site like Asian Sirens what it is (especially now with a forum) is its community of users. As such, I think it makes sense to maximise that social interaction by having social networking features on our site. Although we’ve always had some of these since launching the new site (e.g. friends, followers, posting your own gallery etc.), I always intended to extend these considerably, and the launch of our forum seemed like the right time to do it.

Wall/News Feed/Timeline: Your profile now has your personalised “Wall”, with a “News Feed” and a “Timeline”—the former containing your activity plus that of your friends and the people your following, and the latter only yours—just like Facebook.

Wall posting: In addition to the private messaging we’ve always had, it is now possible to post status updates too, with full privacy controls—once again just like Facebook. It also has the same image, video and previewed link posting capabilities as Facebook. You can also post on a friend’s wall by hitting the “Wall Post” button on their profile. You will notice an @username link at the start of the post—this is what links the post to your friend’s profile (you can post to several friends’ walls by entering this manually). These will be listed under the “Mentions” tab of their wall.

Favorites: the fourth tab on your wall contains the site activity items you mark as a favourite, either via your wall or the sitewide activity streams. Although we’ve always had this feature, it is now more user friendly, as you can now favourite a blog article directly from the article itself, simply by clicking the “Add to Favorites” link at the bottom of the article.

Resharing: You can also reshare any blog post/comment, forum post or activity update to your wall (this looks and works pretty much like Twitter). To make this more user friendly, all activity items now have buttons linking back to the original.

Profile Privacy: Although it has always been possible to control the privacy of your profile, you can now do this for individual parts of it (where it makes sense—as forum posts are always public, it doesn’t makes sense to control their privacy, and you can control the privacy of your picture gallery on an image by image basis).