"Friend" functionality needs to go into a core plugin, enabled by default, so it can be disabled optionally

Whole idea made it into the topic

The entire 'friend' functionality should be in it's own core plugin, enabled by default is fine, but it needs the ability to disable it.

I've searched and it is an involved process, and seems like a 'hack'. It should not be.

On a site where membership is chosen by other members, or smaller sites or people's work sites, everyone is friends with everyone else. Even if they are not, having clear divisions that mark some as friends but not others is not wanted.

The 'everyone friends' plugin allows this same division, as users can remove friends, and is not the same as a plugin that turns it on or off completely.

This should be a 'core' feature

  • Elgg is a social networking engine based on 'friendship' features including 'access collections'. You can rename 'friend' to 'buddy' easy or disable it via hooks. But don't touch the core ;)

  • It is the disable function that I feel should be included with core. I agree it should be left on by default, as most sites would have a use for it, just have the option to turn it off.

    It is not an easy process to disable, and it should be

  • Most of the friends functionality was actually once moved to a bundled plugin. It didn't however take long until core team realized that this was a bad idea. Friends had been integrated too deeply into the core. Because of this the plugin was soon removed and the was code merged back into the core.

    I haven't taken a look at the friends code in a while so I don't know how the current implementation looks.

  • so we are stuck with it? That kinda stinks.

    I need to come up with a work around. Either no one is friends with anyone without any ability to make friend, or everyone is friends with everyone without ability to remove friend.

    I know the 'everyone friends' plugin makes everyone friends with everyone else, but I could not find a plugin to prevent users from "remove friend"

    What about the other side, disabling it. All the pages I found on disabling it seemd overly complicated and did not actually disable functionality

  • not that I'm aware of, but what's the difference?  Grab that one from github and solve your problem

  • I like that plugins shared here have a place for discussion. Other users can evaluate the plugin and provide valuable feedback. If it works great, people leave compliments. If there are problems, often they will be reported in the discussion. If it is malicious, they report that too

    You don't have that on github. Sure there is a place for Issues, but unless the person with an issue is a developer, they are probably not going to create a github account to report a problem. they would just stop using the plugin

    Developing an elgg plugin sharing it on github is great, but not also making a page on the elgg.org site automatically makes the plugin suspicious to me.

    Why isn't the author sharing it on the community site?

    Are they trying to hide something?

    Do they not want to hear (negative)feedback on their work?

    There may be no problem with the plugin at all, but I still always find it suspicious when a developer does not want to share their plugin with the community.

    So, I am not against github, I just prefer plugins shared here. To me, there is a difference

  • Why isn't the author sharing it on the community site?

    Most of the people who download plugins from the community have limited technical skills so I don't want to publish plugins that someone could consider broken or unfinished unless someone makes changes to the code.

    For most plugins I don't have time to maintain a version that is generic enough to be used on any Elgg site. A plugin may work fine on one of the sites I'm maintaining, but as soon as I upload it to the community I start getting requests to make it work with multiple different use cases and plugins. (Also in 95% of the time no-one is ready to pay me for making the changes, so why would I be using my free time on implementing features that I don't need myself?)

    Are they trying to hide something?

    Having plugins publicly available for anyone from Github cannot really be considered "hiding" then. :)

  • (Oh, and the discussion is getting off-topic, so let's continue the plugin/github discussion in another thread, if needed.)

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Feedback and Planning

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