up vote -1 down vote favorite

I find some users' posts relevant and think they are experts and would love to read their answers to different questions posted on the site. Is it possible that I can keep a tab of the users that I would like to follow (much like twitter?). Right now questions posted can have star option for future reference in favorites tab, but it would be better to have a mygurus or myteachers or myfriends tab as well where I can see the activity of my fellow peers.

link
For example, Giles and Moz are few of the gurus, I would like to keep a tab on their answers. – Nikhil Mulley Dec 6 '11 at 15:07
Thanks Michael, that was helpful. Glad to know that I was not alone ;-) – Nikhil Mulley Dec 6 '11 at 20:10
feedback

2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

This kind of feature specifically does not exist on SE site because they are to not make this a social network. The emphasis is on the answer content, not the user who posted it. They specifically make it difficult to use any other way.

I agree it is sometimes useful to look through some really knowledgeable users answers and analyze how they solve problems other than the ones you specifically have. While the site will probably never prompt this kind of usage, the data is open enough that you can browse through it pretty easily using any criteria you like.

The simplest way would be to bookmark a few users answer pages. For example, here is Gilles.

Another would be to use the API to create a feed for yourself of a few peoples answers.

Another way would be to just keep an eye on the home page for problems that interest you and read the top voted solutions to each no matter who they came from. You're bound to learn something from people you might not expect to.

link
Thanks Caleb and Michael. Thats certainly fine. I just wanted to ask you another feature. Can I be able to PM another user (like may be after if I attain some privileges). I understand the chat functionality is available but I also see most of them do not use or see the chat on U&L. So, I was asking if I can have a PM feature, may be a monthly quota limit on how many msgs I can send, that way spam is also avoided. – Nikhil Mulley Dec 6 '11 at 20:10
@Nikhil: For the same reasons cited, PM'ing is specifically not supported. No form of private communication is provided on the network. You can leave a comment on a post of a user that interests you asking to follow up in chat and either link to the main site chat room or some other room you have setup. It will be public, but you can create a room for whatever related topic you want to chat with people about. If they have already been to chat (many high rep users already have) you can just step in yourself and ping them into the room. – Caleb Dec 6 '11 at 21:02
thx Caleb. Sounds fair. BTW, nice initiative on streaming the questions feed to twitter feed :-) – Nikhil Mulley Dec 7 '11 at 9:27
feedback
up vote 0 down vote

You could follow users by the Atom feeds. For example, you can see this in the source for Gilles's user page:

   <link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Feed for user Gilles" href="/feeds/user/885">

You can also just give the user page URL to a feed reader (such as Google Reader) and it'll find that.

link
feedback

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged