Official StumbleUpon Blog

Upcoming Friends and Fans Changes

Wednesday, August 06, 2008

A few days ago we released some changes to the Friends & Fans system, in preparation for a separation of "Friends" and "Subscription" functionality and removing the limit of 200 friends. Right now, when you add a friend you immediately subscribe to their stumbles, but some people have said that they would like to "opt-out" of stumbles from certain friends... people they know in real life but have different tastes in websites. There has also been some confusion over what a "Fan" is, and what a "Mutual Friend" is (when it is really more accurately a "reciprocal friend"). So we have a few changes in the works to improve this system.

Over the next couple weeks we are going to separate the social & content aspects of friendship on SU, so you can subscribe to someone's favorites without necessarily becoming their friend, and become someone's friend without necessarily seeing their stumbles. You'll also be able to "Subscribe" to more than 200 stumblers, since we've changed the way they are stored in the database. Mutuals will just be "Friends", fans will become "Subscribers" and you'll simply be "Subscribed to" stumblers who rate great content. We hope these changes will make things a bit easier to understand for new stumblers, while improving stumble quality for everyone.

During this transitionary period you may notice changes in your friend/fans list. You may have noticed that your # of fans has now dropped - this is because we are now removing "ghost" friends from this list... people who have left SU or deleted their accounts. Up until last friday, your Mutuals & Fans list may have contained some of the "ghost" accounts, but now it should only contain people who are still on SU. So if you see a drop, its not because alot of people have un-friended you, its just because we've finally fixed an old bug in the system You may also notice the order of your "Fans" has changed a bit... that it now shows the newest members to SU, rather than the last person who friended you. These issues (plus a few other bugs we are looking into) will also be fixed in the next week or so, after we change "Fans" to "Subscribers" and remove the 200 limit.

If you have any questions, feel free to Contact us or discuss these changes here: http://stumbleupon.group.stumbleupon.com/forum/97242/

-gmc