New Mobile Nations Profile Popups Ready for Prime Time

[James Falconer]

A quick heads up for everyone today, as we've just finished pushing a new profile popup system to ALL of the Mobile Nations sites. This new feature is tied directly into your Passport account, so you'll want to take note of all the details.

To view the new profile popups, simply click on a username or avatar, and all will be revealed

The popup contains your username, and clearly shows the sites where you have an active account. You will also see your global post count (local post counts are still shown in the sidebar), and number of 'likes' and 'thanks' received. In addition, your location, device and carrier info can be found here.

For the heavy forum user, you will notice some changes. Your occupation and interest information has been replaced by a global 'bio' setting. Any local social links (links to your Facebook, G+, Twitter and Microsoft Accounts) will be found in the new profile popup, and are editable via Passport.

Other than that, most of your 'local' forum settings and options should remain the same.

We hope you enjoy this new feature. If you have any questions or concerns please let us know. We're here to help!

[GMMan]

The full profile link doesn't seem to work. There's "yyy" in front of the profile ID.

Feature request: Allow hiding one or many social network icons. I'd like to keep my personal Facebook separate from the general Internet. So I'll be removing Facebook login for now. Also, the card does not show up if the post has been quick replied or quick edited.

[johncc]

It looks like the icons describing the post categories are missing.

[GMMan]

I wish Mobile Nations would stop messing with perfectly good software (at least the GUI) to implement gimmicky features that may or may not be useful. I liked the like/thanks count as part of the poster info. It gives a quick gauge of rep without having to click on things that take too long to load.

While we're talking about gimmicky, that count up thing in the user card is completely unnecessary and wastes CPU cycles. It may be cool the first couple of times, but it will just get annoying the 10th time you see it. Not to mention it takes forever to count up on the TouchPad. (And also the icons for the counters and social icons don't show up right. I blame the TouchPad browser, but still, this is webOS Nation, and if the site doesn't work nice on webOS we're going to get annoyed.)

(I can see the future: we're going to get that large font Android Central theme, and also have every single link plastered with "register to view this link!" to the unregistered user. Bleh.)

[Remy X]

Originally Posted by GMMan

I wish Mobile Nations would stop messing with perfectly good software (at least the GUI) to implement gimmicky features that may or may not be useful. I liked the like/thanks count as part of the poster info. It gives a quick gauge of rep without having to click on things that take too long to load.

While we're talking about gimmicky, that count up thing in the user card is completely unnecessary and wastes CPU cycles. It may be cool the first couple of times, but it will just get annoying the 10th time you see it. Not to mention it takes forever to count up on the TouchPad. (And also the icons for the counters and social icons don't show up right. I blame the TouchPad browser, but still, this is webOS Nation, and if the site doesn't work nice on webOS we're going to get annoyed.)

(I can see the future: we're going to get that large font Android Central theme, and also have every single link plastered with "register to view this link!" to the unregistered user. Bleh.)

I second that. I like being able to see not just post count, but how long a user has been registered, their thanked/liked count and "thanks".

"Thanks" are more valuable then "likes" since for every one you give it shows up in your side pane for everyone to see. Hiding the "thanks" given, takes away that distinction and will cause users to thank everything in sight without the consequence of looking silly. This is what likes are for.

Perhaps it doesn't matter so much on an iPhone forum, the Apple users like everything simplified, but here we take reputation and interpersonal feedback quite a bit more seriously

...so for me, those new changes were like losing my sense of smell, kind of jarring and unexpected.


And then i suppose the avatar situation is worth a mention too. While the brokenness has been fixed, i would still like an option to delete my blank avatar placeholder or not have the system force a solid white background fill on all transparency. Enforcing a certain size isn't helping either, since pixel art gets all blurry, or one has to take a gray canvas in that size and arrange the small icon on it to mimic transparency.

Now, i'm not a complainer, i just feel the changes have been rushed and the result is a bit disappointing.

[GMMan]

I've just noticed something else: The likes and thanks are aggregates. That poses a problem, because a person may be better with one platform than another, and it'll be hard to tell how helpful someone is if they behave differently on different forums but have similar post counts, join dates, etc. It goes back to the rep thing.

Example: suppose I post frequently on Android Central, but most of my work is done here. I may be completely conversational on Android Central and post roughly the same amount as I do on webOS Nation, but I may get less thanks and likes there than here because I do more homebrew and troubleshooting here. With the new member card system, there's no way of telling the site rep until the full profile on each site is accessed.

[johncc]

Originally Posted by GMMan

I've just noticed something else: The likes and thanks are aggregates. That poses a problem, because a person may be better with one platform than another, and it'll be hard to tell how helpful someone is if they behave differently on different forums but have similar post counts, join dates, etc. It goes back to the rep thing.

......

All of this integration is a complete negative to me. I don't have the slightest interest in the other sites or what anybody does there. And I have to say that I think that webOS is the worse for the changes. Bring back the days when the content and emphasis was decided by a webOS fan.

[RumoredNow]

I too miss the info being available at a glance under the users name and avatar in the left margin.

[johncc]

Originally Posted by RumoredNow

I too miss the info being available at a glance under the users name and avatar in the left margin.

+1

[Marcus Adolfsson]

Originally Posted by GMMan

I've just noticed something else: The likes and thanks are aggregates.

We just pushed out a change where you can now click on the site logo in the pop-up, and the post/counts/thanks/likes are filtered to that site. Still experimenting with the best method to display the information.

You can now also click on the site specific number and be taken to matching search results.

[Marcus Adolfsson]

Originally Posted by GMMan

Feature request: Allow hiding one or many social network icons. I'd like to keep my personal Facebook separate from the general Internet. So I'll be removing Facebook login for now. Also, the card does not show up if the post has been quick replied or quick edited.

We will take the under request. Generally can't you set your FB profile to not be public at all if they are not a friend?

[Marcus Adolfsson]

Originally Posted by GMMan

I liked the like/thanks count as part of the poster info. It gives a quick gauge of rep without having to click on things that take too long to load.

We will reconsider adding these back. We are planning to add a new "activity" or "reputation" score that takes into account the users post history (like stackoverflow etc)

Originally Posted by GMMan

While we're talking about gimmicky, that count up thing in the user card is completely unnecessary and wastes CPU cycles..

Removed.

Originally Posted by GMMan

And also the icons for the counters and social icons don't show up right. I blame the TouchPad browser, but still, this is webOS Nation, and if the site doesn't work nice on webOS we're going to get annoyed.)

We are looking into serving these as icons (instead of font) for the TouchPad.

[GMMan]

Originally Posted by Marcus Adolfsson

We will take the under request. Generally can't you set your FB profile to not be public at all if they are not a friend?

The photo's and name will still show even if everything else is set to private.

[Marcus Adolfsson]

Originally Posted by GMMan

The photo's and name will still show even if everything else is set to private.

Well boo Facebook on that. The FB user ids are incremental...

[Remy X]

Originally Posted by Marcus Adolfsson

[...] We are looking into serving these as icons (instead of font) for the TouchPad.

Yeah, there's a few icons that don't render properly on the TP and on the 2nd gen iPod Touch.

The "gear" icon under Settings, the "envelope" under Notifications, the "log out" icon, and the heart in "we love you".

If the stylesheet is set to cache "forever", it would be quite easy to fix... by wrapping those icons in another tag that would be set to "visibility:hidden" to preserve the space, and have another tag over that which holds an image background as a base64 encoded string (png image), "baked into" the stylesheet.

Then just use a server-side detect and send the correct stylesheet to the correct device


(bg tag) (hide tag) icon (/hide tag) (/bg tag)

[James Falconer]

Sorry to hear some of you aren't the biggest fan of the new features... but it looks like Marcus is coming through with fixes and updates to help you out!

Be sure to let us know if you notice any other bugs or issues with this update. Really helps us 'work out the kinks'.

Thanks all!

[RumoredNow]

OK... So when it shows I use a Veer it displays the black model and I have a Panda.















































































Just kidding... I'm not that fussy.

Or am I?

[James Falconer]

That's simply the image we have for the Veer in our database.

[RumoredNow]

Originally Posted by James Falconer

That's simply the image we have for the Veer in our database.

I knew that. Just some harmless teasing...

[Remy X]

The profile popups fail spectacularly on the Pre+ (v.1.4)...

If you click on a name somewhere near the bottom of the thread, the page zooms out, you lose your place and the popup appears at the top of the page, but you don't even see it. Sometimes, the result even mimics a browser crash, because what you see is the light grey browser canvas, until you scroll up and then you'll see the rendered page. This is truly an awful implementation and adds nothing to the forum... when this happens every time i want to see a user's reputation.

Clicking on "Forum profile" will also make the link text 3x bigger before going to that page

I wish WebOS Nation didn't have to be merged with the other forums for devices that still receive manufacturer support and updates. This is just so messed up

...and slow, and counterproductive


Edit - Merged two posts into one:

To explain this a little more clearly, one has to pinch-zoom to click on a name to the left of a post, just to see a person's reputation....if you are at the last few posts, you see a pseudo-"browser crash" with nothing on the screen.... if you didn't panic yet, you scroll up to the top, and if you accidentally click on something non-clickable along the way, the profile popup disappears before you get to the top of a long page....