Friends vs Connections

I don't understand the difference between "Friends" and "Connections!"  I'm trying to simplify the menu and I think I'll remove "Connections."

The way I understand it is like this: Connections are contacts you have made with other members - good or bad. Example. You have friends which is a good contact, but you also have people you blocked - which is a bad connection. Plus, you can make a member a favorite without making them a friend. So, there needed to be a place where these different category of persons can be reviewed.

 RE:

 HUH?

The connections section has 3 links - Friends, Blocked, and favorites.

Friends are good connections, blocked are bad connections, and favorites are favorite connections, but these persons do not need ot be a friend to be favorited. So, it seems like they needed a single place to put these 3 different types of "connections"

That's as clear as mud

Whats your explanation of the connections section?

 Actually, I don't seem to have a connections section.  Where can I get one?

If you are looking at your account page, there is a connection link where the avatar link is. If yours is not there, then in the navigation menu builder under dashboard, you may have hidden or removed the Activity section (which in itself is retarded as it is labeled Activity in the menu builder, but connections on the actual page).

If you remove the connections link you will no longer have a way to get to the list of people that were added as favorites or people that have been blocked. Both of which are actions in the action block on a persons profile.

So connections are basically a list of all 3. Friends, Favorites and Blocked members.

 RE

Now that I've found it, It looks like it is something Boonex consolidated, that should not have been consolidated.  That's why it's confusing.  There should be separate blocks for 'Friends', 'Faves', and 'Blocked'.  None have anything to do with each other, and should not be grouped like this.  People these days associate the term 'connections' with Linkedin, where 'connection' is analogous to 'friend'.

I think I'll write a ticket on this, because it's dumb.  I have to think about it a while though.

 ROFLMFAOP

http://www.boonex.com/trac/dolphin/ticket/3387

I agree HL, it is like calling members of a group fans.  Fans, shorten form of fantics, makes no sense for members of a group.  Of course it was an easy fix by just changing the language key.  There are a lot of areas of Dolphin that are similar and just confuse the members of the site.  And the favs should go as well.

I am constantly explaining to my boss the terms used, so I renamed a lot of them. For fans, I am calling it interested (makes more sense to me - someone is interested in something). Plus I have a module that I created based off of the groups module, in which I renamed Fans to Staff, and another module where I changed to Collaborators. Hell, I don't even like the term friends, so relabeled that to Colleagues.

Do any of you have sites that are so large that you have to limit connectivity by forcing someone to befriend someone else? Friends or 'connectivity' or 'interested topics' or whatever else you want to call it can make a 500 user site look barren and totally devoid of other members.

Why everyone has latched onto this idea, an idea that's sole original design on Facebook was to manage the millions of users that signed up. Any of you have millions of users?

Actually myspace came first in 2003

Then facebook in 2004 but was available only to collages and universities. Did not allow public use until 2005.

So facebook was not first with the friends thing,

 RE:

 If you have a site with two members, there's a good chance they may not like each other.  It's more about people having the ability to control who can view all of their stuff.  You wouldn't walk up to a complete stranger on the street and start showing them all your camera photos..... why should online behavior be any different?

or telling them what you had for lunch or that your big toe infection is getting worst.  I really don't understand this new mindset myself.

 I totally agree!! And without proper documentation we are left to figure all of this out for ourselves :(

 Yup, for sure.

Thanks for the laugh houstonlively!

I do have a much better understanding now, thank you all.  I'm going to keep "connections" but I will come up with a different name for it that's hopefully more self-explanitory.

 RE:

 I'd go with 'Friends, Foes, and Hoes'.  It's got a nice ring to it.

That's just nonsense. I guess it would matter if you were building communities where people reported their booger picking or were trying to classify their date choices by tit size.

How about the larger percentage of communities that are based around a specific topic? Auto repair forums are a good example as would be mine, a towing and recovery specific site? They would be totally worthless if the relevant content they posted had to be 'authorized' to each individual member before it could be viewed. Hiding anything on those types of sites defeats the entire purpose of the site.

The idea of friends are great for sites designed to build personal relationships but all those other sites that don't do that and I am pretty sure they number far more than 'personal relationship' sites, the idea they must friend someone to interact only serves to make the site useless.

Like someone mention on another post, Dolphin can be use to build a variety of different sites.

 RE:

 Yes, I suppose blue collar workers in general, are less particular about the company they keep.  They have to be.  If I ever start a site about tires, I guess I'll keep it wide open.

If you'd ever actually step outside your house, you might notice it's the blue collar workers that keep this world turning.....

Don't feed a troll, just report them to the moderators.

 RE:

 You could say the same thing about plankton. Both are necessary parts of the food chain.  I wasn't really talking about all the menial little tasks in the world that someone needs to do.  I was attempting to make you understand that most people these days are particular about who they interact with over the internet, and that the capability to have those choices, is not nonsense as you so naively postulate. 

I give up. You still don't get it

So connections can be seen at yoursite.com/communicator.php (friends, favourites, blocked).

On top of it all I have the dolphin twitter mod so now there are followers.

So when viewing a profile I can befriend, subscribe, follow (twitter mod) and fave.

EEK this is a kids site.  Sorting all of this out makes my brain hurt.  I need to simplify things!

Q:  what does "subscribe" mean exactly... I mean, what exactly changes when you subscribe to someone?  I need to know because it will determine which one I ditch - "follow" (twitter mod) or "subscribe."  If subscribe (for one thing) tells me in some way that a person has updated their status (I don't think it does) then I'll ditch "follow" because it's redundant and also, updates (tweets) do not show up in notifications.

So right now, following someone sends me an email that the person updated their status (tweeted something).  But there are no notifications on the site (except in the spy and it doesn't print the status).  There is an updated tweets box though on the home page so that's good.

Back to my question about "subscribe" - what happens / changes?

Subscribe - to receive a notification(email I think) when a user changes/updates their profile.

OK thanks.  I don't want to get bogged down with emails... kids don't even have email addresses anyway.  Well some do but they don't check them, they just use them to register/sign up for stuff!!!

It's all so confusing.  I wonder if I subscribe to someone who is not my friend their activity will show in the separate notifications page?

I NEED to sort this all out and simplify things, and this is my goal for the week.  I'll test everything out and make a separate post about it.