Subscribing to individual users

Hi babowa,

To change the user the widget is looking at: Go to "your View" and click the 'personalize' link by where it says "Your View". This gives edit menus at the top of each widget in "Your View" (look a the right of the title of the widget). Select "edit this widget" and change the user it is watching here.

When you are done make sure you select "Publish Layout", otherwise your changes won't stick.

Best wishes

John M

I guess a picture is worth a thousand words:

How do I drag a user into the field?

The blue block you have posted an image of shows you what is available to add to your personal view. The "+Drag to Add" button is how you add this widget to your view. Click it and drag it to the top (or bottom, but I found top easier) of one of the columns below the blue block. It should indicate when it is somewhere you can drop it. Once you have done that, you can change the user selected as I indicate above.

Please let me know if this makes sense or not.

Best wishes

John M

John Maisey wrote:

Yes, the drag and drop is a little fiddly. You can see when it's going to work as a green bar appears where it is going to go.

🙂 eventually I worked out I must have successfully dragged and dropped, because I found some widgets lurking in slightly odd places on the page after a few attempts. Once I got the hang of dragging and dropping, I eventually managed to set up a widget showing the last 100 threads Meg had contributed to, which was interesting. Have one for myself, now.

Some powerful functions in there. By way of experiment, I ended up setting up a widget showing the top 500 members in terms of points tallies on the entire Communities. Took a while to populate. (Every now and then I'd go back to my Your View, and another 100 members had shown up.) But it got there. Will come in handy (in a refined form) keeping track of who's doing well and would do well with encouragement in some of the communities I'm in.

b noir wrote:

🙂 eventually I worked out I must have successfully dragged and dropped, because I found some widgets lurking in slightly odd places on the page after a few attempts.

🙂 That is pretty much how it felt to me the first time I made it work.

Some powerful functions in there.

I agree. With a few tweaks it could be very useful. I'm not sure if the Watch a User widget can be set to watch several people eventually, that would make that one far more useful.

Best wishes

John M

I agree. With a few tweaks it could be very useful. I'm not sure if the Watch a User widget can be set to watch several people eventually, that would make that one far more useful.

We're almost there in that we can set up multiple copies of the widget, each set to a different member. (By way of experiment, I just set up one for watching you and another for watching babowa.)

Hi b noir,

I set one up for watching you. For some reason your user is 'hidden' and not in the initial list. Mysterious...

John M

Yeah, I get troubles when trying to do searches on my posts with that sort of thing. I never appear in the available options drop-down thingy ... I always have to do a lookup of b noir in order to choose myself.

(Sigh) my alias has always caused strange grief on the forums ... Back in the WebX days, b followed by a space was a quick-format code that bolded the following paragraph. Not that many new posters knew that. So folks would start their posts with (say):

b noir, I followed your advice and ...

... but what would display in their reply was:

noir, I followed your advice and ...

... and they'd get a bit upset and apologise for the mysterious bolding, and I'd have to explain to them that they'd done nothing wrong, and it was all my fault ...

Sounds like fun! (but probably not after ten times or so...)

... there was one occasion when it nearly started a fight between Stardeb55 and toonz. Deb started a post with my alias in reply to toonz which went completely bold, due to the b-space thing. toonz assumed Deb was shouting at her, Deb didn't use that quick-format code, so had no idea what had just happened with the posts and was a bit grumpy herself ...

I've tried all the dragging dropping I intend to do. I am not wasting more time. Tried to drop it over one user in the top participants list about half a dozen times. Didn't work. There should be an easy way: click on User, choose to watch.

This tutorial may be helpful.

https://discussions.apple.com/___sbsstatic___/apple/tutorial/personalize.html

John M

Hi babowa,

Wanted see if you have seen the following features.

When you click on a user, the Actions panel should show you the following.

• You can then either Receive email notifications
• In my case I can click the Member RSS feed in Safari, and when I click on that Action my Safari RSS reader is automatically populated. Also works for me in Firefox.

For the Watch a User widget, just want to make sure that after you drag and drop the Watch a User widget you are then editing that widget and selecting the specific username.

Let me know if this helps!

Thanks,

-Matt K.

English Communities Manager

Matt,

I appreciate you trying to help - but I'm done trying. Here is what I now have:

I still don't have a user. I can create a million empty widgets, but can't find a way to actually list someone there.

It should be as easy as clicking on a user's profile and hitting "subscribe to this user". I'm not exactly dim-witted, but I can't get it to work. If I can't do it in less than a minute (and I've spent at least 30 minutes alltogether on it), I give up. FWIW, I do not have RSS feeds enabled - I don't need more distractions or notifications; that is a personal choice.

Hi babowa,

I appreciate you're finding this process frustrating. I'm sorry if what I've said is not clear.

It does look from your image that you are very nearly there. There is a downward pointing arrow to the left of the Watch a User bar in your image. If you click that you should see what is in Matt's second image above. You should choose 'Edit this widget" from that menu and you'll see what Matt has shown in his third image. You should then be able to select a user by clicking "Change".

(links above open in new window)

John M