Request: Ability to follow forum users

In the old forums, I was able to subscribe to a person and get an email notification whenever that person posted something. Doing this may seem like stalking, but I used this to follow a few of my favorite Apple engineers on various teams and found it was a great way to stay up to date with current developments in the topics that interested me. I found a bunch of great topics this way that I would never have seen otherwise.


I’d love it if you could add this feature to the new forums. Thanks!

Accepted Reply

I just noticed that if you hover over a given user's face/avatar/icon, there is an now an option there to 'follow'.


>I wonder if whoever redesigned this new forum, really and truly has produced the best possible solution to developer needs?


I'm fairly certain that Apple knows it doesn't communicate well at our level. Only time will tell if that can be improved.

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+1

+1

Generally speaking, Apple does not monitor these forums. You should use the Report Bugs link at the bottom of each page to submit a feature request. That's the only thing they look at when setting their development priorities.

Well, the tagline for this part of the forums reads: "Provide feedback or request enhancements to the forums", so I think I’m exactly in the right place.

Apple monitors these forums more than people think, sometimes 😉


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Perhaps they are changing their approach nowadays, but in the past, any talk of Apple actually paying attention to the developer forums has been mainly lip service. Their entire internal workflow is centered around radars.


*Maybe* they will have someone monitoring the forums and entering radars for you, but I wouldn't bet on it.

>has been mainly lip service.

My direct conversations with Apple in the past month don't bear your opinion out. They watch here on many levels, including staffers that don't have access to bug reports.

Instead of putting those efforts down, it might be better for all of us to leverage them, I think.

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OK. I will reserve judgement in future. My opinion was based on what I've seen and heard in the past, but I'm open to changing it if evidence supports that 🙂

🙂

I seem to be alone in observing that this problem has been solved already.


On the web there are a number of sites that deliver this kind of utility.


Someone poses a difficult question.

From within a community of members, several may answer.

Those who provide excellent advice are upvoted. Those who provide poor advice are downvoted.

High quality answers bubble to the top. Content is edited to improve the utility of the question and answer.

A gamification of the reputation system motivates a culture of helpfulness.

And since this is a post-PC world, we could even imagine a device-based app, which would provide instant notifications for helpful responses.


When WWDC is overwhelmed with interest and a huge global development community is struggling to get answers to their questions, I wonder if whoever redesigned this new forum, really and truly has produced the best possible solution to developer needs?

I just noticed that if you hover over a given user's face/avatar/icon, there is an now an option there to 'follow'.


>I wonder if whoever redesigned this new forum, really and truly has produced the best possible solution to developer needs?


I'm fairly certain that Apple knows it doesn't communicate well at our level. Only time will tell if that can be improved.

Perhaps, if the world-wide community of developers in a spirit of helpfulness, debated and discussed what form that improvement should take that might help the process along?

> I just noticed that if you hover over a given user's face/avatar/icon, there is an now an option there to 'follow'.


Really? I’m not seeing that.

I noticed that also.

My mistake, my content blocking extension blocked the Follow button. Thanks for checking!