How User Relationships Work

A user relationship connects two people in the community, allowing them to see one another's community activity.

People can be part of two kinds of relationships, as described below. An administrator can enable one or both kinds of relationships. An administrator can also enable whether people using the community are able to create their own relationships, as well as whether approval should be required from the second person when the first requests a relationship.

• Organizational chart relationships, such as a relationship in which one person reports to another. Depending on how relationships are configured, it can be possible for people in the community to create their own relationships in either direction -- as reporting or reported to.

  Depending on how your community is configured, organizational relationships might be defined in an external user identity system such as LDAP or Active Directory, and merely displayed in the application. If so, these relationships typically can't be edited in the admin console or by people using the community.

• Friend or connection relationships, where two people are connected outside a hierarchical context. Your community will support either friend or connection relationships depending on whether user relationships have been configured to be bidirectional (friends) or unidirectional (connections/follows).

  In addition to determining how you manage such relationships in the admin console, the directionality setting determines the labels and commands people see in the application's end user interface. For example, one person can "friend" another to create a bidirectional friend relationship in which they're friends of one another. In contrast, a person can "follow" another to create a unidirectional connection relationship in which the followed person's activity is seen by the first person, but the followed person needn't reciprocate.

  Direction	Description	Example
  Unidirectional (follow)	A unidirectional relationship is one in which one person declares a relationship with another person, but the other person isn't invited to reciprocate (although they can separately create a similar relationship with the first person). Unidirectional relationships might be suited to situations where a reciprocal (bidirectional) relationship would be inappropriate or burdensome for the second person.	Someone working in a particular area is interested in keeping up with the work of another person who is doing research in that area. The first person clicks a link to "follow" the researcher. The researcher has no particular interest in following the person following them, so they needn't be prompted to follow the first person. If approval is required, the researcher receives the request and decides whether to approve it and let the first person follow them; otherwise, the unidirectional relationship is created automatically.
  Bidirectional (friend)	In a bidirectional relationship, one person's relationship declaration creates (or at least invites) a relationship that goes the other way. Bidirectional relationships might be useful for communities in which people's personal relationships are less hierarchical, or are less specialized.	Someone with a particular interest notices that another person has similar or complementary interests. The first person clicks a link to "add as a friend" the second person. If approval is required, the second person receives the request and decides whether to approve it and become a friend of the first person; otherwise, the bidirectional relationship is created automatically.