Content Relevancy
One of the major new features offered by the application is the smart social relevancy algorithm that is calculated based on the app user’s Facebook network of friends and personal interests. The social relevancy algorithm not only determines which content from your community is displayed to a user, but also which other boards are featured from the network. Your community and content become a dynamic part of a vast vBulletin Social Network and as a result promoted to new users based on their interests and activity.
Relevant Content Recommendations for Your App’s Users
Here is how it all works together. When a user installs the application for the very first time Facebook will prompt to grant the application privileges to collect the user’s profile information. If permitted, the application will collect general information about the user, their personal interests and generic information about their friends such as facebook ids. This information is sent back to the vBulletin Social Network service for processing, where it is matched to create relevancy recommendations based on newly discovered users’ relationships and interests. This new relevant and valuable data is sent to your vBulletin Facebook app and is used to determine which content from your community is featured to your user as they “Discover” and “Explore” your site.
Let’s take a quick look at this transaction, here is an example of data collected:
‘facebookid’;’friendsfacebookids’;’interests’
The sample record stored is something similar to this:
‘100000087348584’;’10150801962190352’;’soccer,vbulletin,http://www.twitter.com/inetskunkworks,chess,ringflyers,mordor’
Promoting Your Community via vBulletin Social Network
In addition to the content relevancy logic benefiting your app’s end-users, your application connects your community into a vast vBulletin social community network. The “Friends’ Forums” container located at the bottom of the application will automatically recommend your community to your users’ network of friends based on their usage of other forums / apps.
Example Use-Cases / Data Transactions:
The following is a general example as to how the Social Network Services uses Facebook data to create recommendations. For example, let’s say that:
- On vBulletin.com, IBxAnders is user id ‘257345’. On Facebook, IBxAnders is profile id ‘100000087348584’. The service tells the app that id 100000087348584 is friends with ‘jon doe’ and ‘jane doe’ on Facebook.
- It happens that ‘jane doe’ uses the ‘Imaginary Forum App’, based on this information IBxAnders will see a recommendation in the ‘Friends’ Forums’ section of his vBulletin.com app for the ‘Imaginary Forum App’.
- Let’s also assume that IBxAnders’ friend ‘jon doe’ also uses the vBulletin.com Facebook App. Since the service matches the forum membership and the Facebook friendship information, IBxAnders will see more activity and content from ‘jon doe’ inside the vBulletin Facebook App.
Opting Out and Un-Installing
Opting-out of the vBulletin Social Network is easy. If the user un-installs the Facebook application, data associated with their activity via that particular application will be removed. In addition, the user can also opt-out from participating in the Social Network component via a UserCP setting in an individual forum. The UserCP setting will hide all activity on a particular forum from the Social Network component. (This setting group is not yet available on vBulletin.com).
A Basic Diagram of How This System Works
Look at the menus to the left, in the "operations" box you can click the link to add your vote to the issue. Please also make a comment, make your voice heard. The tracker seem to be the proper place to get the developers to notice our dislike of the "friends forums" links.