Activity Feed

Activity Feed#

The Activity Feed gives players the ability to post and share their activities to a targeted audience.

Feed#

The activity feed, or news feed, is a central subsystem of the XBE Social Component. Through the activity feed users are able to follow posts of influencers, public figures, friends, family and more. Like any good social network the activity feed is custom tailored to the relationships of the user.

The algorithm used to create a user’s personal activity feed is intentionally simple in order to keep the network both safe and reliable. The algorithm observes the following rules:

  1. Retrieve all posts visible to the user and sorted by the following (in order of importance):

    1. Posts made by friends.

    2. Posts made by others the user is following.

    3. Posts made by anyone else with PUBLIC visibility.

In addition to the above the algorithm filters out any posts by anyone that the user has blocked.

Posts#

When a user wants to share their latest activity with their social network they create a Post. Each Post contains some content and an optional set of media and/or tags. Users can re-share other posts and add their own commentary as well. This is achieved by setting the parentUid property. Players have the ability to control who can see their posts by setting the desired visibility. Visibility of posts can be open to the entire public or limited to a user’s followers or confirmed friends.

The system expects that implementing apps support rich text formatting of the post content. The system will automatically the content for mentions and perform profanity filtering.

Comments#

Once a Post has been created it will be visible to the social network with the desired visibility. Other users that are able to see the post can then freely add commentary to the post by creating a Comment. The content may contain basic text or rich text formatting. The system will automatically process mentions of other users but requires that the mentioned meet the visibility requirements of the original post. In addition, all content is automatically filtered for profanity.

The owner of the original Post also has the option to disable comments by setting the locked property to true. Existing comments that were made before the post was locked will remain and visible.

Reactions#

Users may also react to a Post by submitting a Reaction. A reaction is simply an emoji response by a given user. The system allows for any type of emoji to be submitted. No validation of the emoji name is performed when submitting a reaction. The responsibility is thus left to the implementing application to decide what types of emojis are supported.