Share individual posts via social media

[My Name is Billy Moonstone]

The Actions menu already allows you to share a whole Thread via Facebook and Twitter, however I tend to share individual replies within threads and I imagine this is more common than sharing the whole thread, that can run to many pages

I tried selecting an individual post and then using the Actions route to share it, but the link you get just brings you back to the beginning of the thread i.e. selecting a post doesn't affect the particular action

I think it makes sense to be able to share the link direct to the particular post through the forum rather than having to get the link to the post, copy it, open your social media, paste it and so on

In V4 there was a code that allowed this - it placed lots of different social media share buttons at the bottom of each post - but I don't know if this has been ported over to V5

[Ryan Roos]

We will discuss this.

However, I would like to also explain why it is the way it currently is. There are two big reasons. The first is context. It's very important for a person to understand what is going on. Jumping right to page 4 of a thread and reading the 5th post on that page doesn't quite have the same effect as actually reading the thread beforehand. Go try it. Just jump into a thread you've never seen before, go to the 4th page and 5th post. See if reading that gives you any idea of what's going on. The second reason is that we are a free forum company. It benefits us if people read more, which in turn helps us continue hosting your forum. I hope that explains it more.

That all being said I do agree with you that not getting linked to the post you wanted to link to can be annoying especially if the thread was a couple hundred pages or so (those do exist, btw).

Thank you.

[My Name is Billy Moonstone]

Thanks Ryan Roos and I appreciate both your reasons

I'd like to add on (1) it's important to trust that the person sharing the content will do it with some thought to how the audience will react - if I, for example, made a habit of tweeting random confusing links then people would pretty soon stop following them (and me). On (2) both we as the individual forums and you as the hosts could probably be seen as partners in this, in that we both have something to be gained from pulling more people onto our boards from outside, especially via social media. The more we pull people in with judicious tweets and gain ourselves from that, then the more that benefits you in that more people are reading more, across the boards

I've spent a lot of time ad-free over the last 6 years but stopped probably about a year ago. I intend to go ad-free again when my V5 launches - to be honest, V5 has given me a new inspiration for my forum so thank you for that - and all these little fiddly things, intuitive things even, are the kind of things I like about the overall Proboards experience, especially now with V5

All the best

[Ryan Roos]

Something else to consider that I didn't until I talked to Patrick Clinger yesterday about this was that the social media links are in the action bar of the thread. Meaning right now it should be pretty clear that they share the thread, not a specific post. We did go ahead and add a task for Social Media links to be added to the post drop down (gearbox), though it will probably be a while before that gets added (v5.x).

One thing we will do to improve the current social media linking is that from now on (once we code it) the link that is provided to Facebook will included the extended URL. Meaning if you are on page 5 of the thread when you link it to Facebook. Now it will take you to page 5, instead of page 1. This should maintain thread context while still getting people right where you want them in very long threads. I hope that makes a big difference for you for now. Then someday we'll work on getting social linking for posts.

[My Name is Billy Moonstone]

Thanks for taking the time to explain this Ryan Roos. If you mean the extended link will work with Twitter too then that will certainly be an improvement (I don't use Facebook myself - Twitter brings in more traffic)


I'm happy to continue using the link to post in the gear wheel and pasting this into Twitter (or using the Bitly bookmarks bar button) for now. I'm used to it anyway. If one day you can integrate social sharing of posts that would be great - would make it more slick

Actually, do you think it would be technically possible for someone to come up with a mod/plugin that did what the old V4 code did (see bottom right of attached pic) and embed social share links into individual posts? This might solve it more easily

If it's possible in theory then I'll go and get begging on the mod boards!

Thanks again

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