How to disable Following (aka stalking) in Alfresco Community

[gerryr]

I have been all over this Share interface and I cannot find anywhere to disable Following.

How do we disable this Following (aka stalking) business in Alfresco?

People don't need to be concerned about what other employees are doing.

They need to be concerned only about what they are doing.

[mitpatoliya]

please give more details on your requirement what exactly you want to disable?

[ddraper]

If you mean disable by a simple configuration parameter, then you can't. If you would like this to have a disable config switch in a future release then I would suggest you raise an improvement request in JIRA (http://issues.alfresco.com).

Just out of interest, what do you feel is wrong with the "Follow" feature?… we use Alfresco internally (eating our own dog-food as we do) and I find this feature incredibly useful in what is primarily a collaborative application.

[gerryr]

Not everybody finds this feature useful and yes, there needs to be a configuration parameter that allows you to turn this feature off.

https://issues.alfresco.com/jira/browse/ALF-20770

In the meantime, what can be done to disable this feature manually?

[scouil]

Hi Gerry,

Except if some users have expressed concerns about being "stalked" as you put it, then I'd suggest you spare yourself the development time and let each user decide if it's useful to him.
Otherwise, I guess an easy way to disable it would be to add an interceptor in from of the "subscriptionService" to disable the "follow" function.
Then you might want to write a short script to unfollow all the users who might already follow someone else.
Finally, you may want to tweak a bit the UI to remove the follow button and the following/followers tabs in the users profile

[gerryr]

In our particular case, we want the entire feature disabled.

UPDATE:  The JIRA bug was updated with a setting that disables this feature.  Marking as Solved.

But you bring up a good point that even when the Follow feature is enabled users should be able to control whether they want to be followed or not.