Following posters instead of topics

[CSGibson]

I would like to request a feature on the forums where I can get alerts for when certain posters that I select for whatever critera I choose comment on a thread, whether I am following that thread or not.

 

When Justin, Mike, or Andy, to name a few, comment, then I feel like I can gain from whatever bridge they drop, but I feel like I miss those among the volume of other replies that I find less appealing.

[Antrax]

Presumably you'll still see the less appealing posts, unless you want their posts without any of the context. So, maybe it's better to use the forum ignore feature and/or use "view posts by member" occasionally:

http://www.bridgebase.com/forums/index.php?app=core&module=search&do=user_activity&mid=6354 (You get to it from a user's profile, "find my content")

[barmar]

Newer versions of the IP.Board software have a "friend" feature; I'm not really sure what it does. There's a debate in their customer forum regarding changing this to a "follow" system:

 

http://community.invisionpower.com/topic/337690-get-rid-of-friends-and-make-it-a-follow-system/

[inquiry]

You can click on any user's name, and then click the "find my content" button on the left hand side of the screen. It will show all topics (sadly not individual post) they have made in the last so many days (most recent first). This is sort of a manual way to do what you ask for today.

[barmar]

You can also click on the "Topics" and "Posts" tabs in their profile page to see threads they've started recently and the most recent few posts.

[1eyedjack]

I think that many of these suggestions fail in the mobile skin

[barmar]

I think that many of these suggestions fail in the mobile skin

I wouldn't be surprised. That's another area that Invision has supposedly improved significantly in newer versions.

[1eyedjack]

does bbo need to raise some funding to upgrade the forum software? I may be naive but I would expect this to be a drop in the ocean

[barmar]

The problem isn't money, it's engineering resources. We need to merge our customizations into the new version, and set up a test environment to make sure it works. We're so far behind that there's a good chance we can't simply drop our existing code into the new version.

 

The version we have is still "good enough", so upgrading is not at the top of the priority list. Unfortunately, it's kind of a deadly spiral -- the more out of date we become, the harder the upgrade is likely to be.