Lighting a candle for the dearly departed Activity Stream

There are certain things about you that will be missed:

1. You announced New Premium Members and Newly Registered Members.

• You were a not-so-subtle encouragement to get others to "join in" too.
• You gave instant recognition to newbies.
• You gave community leaders a convenient place to see and follow up on newbies listed there. (Where do they go now?)
• You were a visible way to generate a sense of "community" -- which is something that has been talked about in other places here at Stack.
  
  

2. You did four jobs in one widget and they had to replace you with two widgets, that's how good you were at your job.

• Replies and Interactions have their own widget now, and New Topics have their own. But they forgot that you also announced new members.
• You were svelte, whereas your replacement, the Content Stream widget, chews up screen real estate and visually looks like a fat blob of text.

3. You gave the appearance that "things were happening at our site."

• This meant you fostered a sense of "community" that people wanted to join -- a subject Stack blogs have been discussing.
  
  

4. You were unappreciated by others according to the people who made you.

• They say not a lot of people were using you, so you weren't important. But I thought you were important. Sure, you could have been better, but who can't? 
• They say you were too complicated (code-wise), and I accept that. But you know what? Groupee/Hoop/Stack has a history of doing the impossible. They made you didn't they?
  

5. I know they made you disappear in Responsive Mode, but I always knew you were there lurking in the background.

• In fact, I created a page with just your widget so our community leaders could check you on their cellphones. And now, it only shows "New Topics" which makes me miss you even more.

You're dead, but I hope they will honor your memory by improving your replacements, and resurrrecting one of your most important functions by creating a widget or feature that "announces" new registered members, premium members, and renewals.   

R.I.Pieces Activity Stream

Neil

Nice write-up, Neil.

This was a terrible decision.

Thx Rich. I wouldn’t call it “terrible.” Not that apocalyptic 😎

Sometimes my changes at our site have what we call “unintended consequences.” A simple color change negatively affects a feature somewhere else I didn’t expect, and so on. You know.

Let’s see how they solve the unintended consequence of this particular change. They always do.

I assist a large and varied recreational vehicle information forum in connecting its 23,000+ members to those who are outstanding in the field of posting valued CONTENT topic threads (formerly listed separately from COMMENTS). This moderately popular activity and the valuable ability of any member to access via these former CONTENT links in our gurus of knowledge Profile links is seriously degraded by the lumping of CONTENT and COMMENTS into what has been and remains the basic Display All Posts search query. Now the few-to-many informationally valuable Topic threads are buried amongst perhaps thousands of Topic Replies within the activity of our most valuable posters. This degradation of categorization is a profound disservice to the functionality and lifeblood of our forum. Please reconsider!

Plance has hit the nail on the head, when he says,"...Now...valuable Topic threads are buried amongst perhaps thousands of Topic Replies...This degradation of categorization is a profound disservice to the functionality and lifeblood of our forum..."

This is exactly the problem. What you've done here is the equivalent of having a nicely organized filing system and taking all the files and dumping them into a single file folder. I'm sure you don't have your in-house computers set up that way. You have them organized into drives, folders, and files that make sense and allow you to do your work in the back end of the system efficiently. Why can't we - your customers - enjoy that same level of organization on the front end?

I really hope you reconsider this ill-conceived change. The functionality of our forum has been severely "deprecated" because of this.

@Rich Melvin, can you be more specific about what you're missing from the Activity Stream? Is it just the old Activity tab on the member's profile? Is there something else? It's unclear to me what your primary complaint is, so I'm just trying to understand your perspective.

I'll also mention that we're working on adding a Posts tab to the member profile this week, as I announced here. @Plance, you may be happy to hear about this, as well.

@Brian Lenz, I, and our forum, will be happy if the new Posts tab will be as functional and we can copy/paste it into future posts as live links to members' valued content as we could before. Thank you for your response!

"...can you be more specific about what you're missing from the Activity Stream?..."

Read Neil's post in this thread. He did a much better job of explaining this than I could ever do.

ALL THAT is what's missing!

@Rich Melvin

While I appreciate your appreciation, Rich, my reading of various posts from Julie, Plance, and you at OGR suggest that y'all are using the A.S. differently than we do (used to). Seems like you folks want some of the A.S.' functionality on User Profile Pages, whereas we liked it as a look-see widget on our homepage and embedded on a custom page.  My eulogy doesn't mention your User Profile functions.

That said, yes, I would love to see the "activity" publicly visible (streaming/live) as it was before showing new premiums, new registrations, new community point level-ups.  (But I don't see that addressing your Profile--Display Posts issues.)