What is the real intent of Activities?

Horton

I am afraid my users are going to be confused.

I see how it works but I am not sure how it should be used.

I wish I had the skills to get if off the top of the basic themes.

Raize

what r u talkin about

vegano

hi Horton,

do you know facebook?

Activities are the wall of facebook - so "what are people doing at the moment".

The discussions are for talk about issues and finding solutions or somethings.
The activity stream is for everyting around: "I'm taking a shower", "It's winter in my city", "I'm working on the new Layout for the website.tld site - how wants to see a wireframe? look here http://example.com/wireframe.html", "Who has stolen my cookies?"...

So look right on the left side of the discussion overview.
There is a area where the news of the developer team is displayed - that's how the activity stream might be used - most "ordinary" users in this forum doesn't use the function, so there are only system information.

So activities are for personal updates.

Horton

Yea that is what I was afraid of. I think it is going to fracture the conversation on my site. I want one clean stream of posts - not two

I am fine with it if the users have to click on their user name to get to it (Like it is here). But on the menu next to discussions is a bad option. I guess this is a theme thing and I do not know how to do that.

DavyB

these 2 sidebar modules are clearly using the same data except the "News from the Developers" only selects from the small subset of developers who clearly have to remember to update entries when they want to. If people bothered to set the activity in their profile it would probably show in "Recent Activity" on the "Community" aka "All Questions" page until 5 more system selected or manual events e.g. signups, profile picture changes etc. push their activity entry off the list.
If they are too distracting you don't have to use them or even have them enabled