Elo, if you do this, please make the setting to let people follow you opt-in from the start.
That would make the follow feature pointless then, all the farmers would opt-out to avoid other farmers knowing what games they are running.
[quote=Viper]That would make the follow feature pointless then, all the farmers would opt-out to avoid other farmers knowing what games they are running.[/quote]
If the only use case for this feature is to follow run farmers and it gets rendered useless just because of being opt-out, I'd say it's an idea not even worth implementing in the first place. That being said, I actually believe it'd still be widely used in other situations, such as to follow your friends on the site and whatnot.
I should rephrase my statement:
Making it opt-in would make the follow feature pointless. @MrMonsh mentioned that one of the more widely used feature would be to follow friends, but if friends never opt-in from being inactive, or some other reason related to not checking the site often, they may miss this feature. I would suggest making it opt-out if anything for a few reasons:
Long time inactive users would be able to participate. Although they may not be submitting runs/forum posts anymore, other users would still have the ability to follow these users.
It would be easier to track previously banned players. Users who have cheated in the past, banned, then later unbanned can be monitored more closely by the community, if they wish to do so.
This can also be used to track potential mod farmers. Following a user to get notifications when they are added as mods to new games can be a useful resource for tracking down mod farmers.
While I have my personal reasons for wanting this feature (wr farming), I believe that having this potential feature as "opt-out" would be more beneficial than "opt-in" for the reasons listed.
Src is not a social media platform. Stop trying to make it one. If people wanna see what my newest runs are, I would not wanna have them see it here but rather through my content creation platforms such as youtube or twitch. How does it make it any easier to follow a cheater? If someone cheated you are going to know for sure. Also if we havent seen it already happen with features like the comment system, it can be easily abused and especially younger speedrunners could easily be harassed by jerks.