Stories

The Stories plugin gives members photo, video and text stories that disappear by themselves after a day. They sit in a row at the top of the home feed, open in a full-screen viewer, and their owner sees who watched them.

What members get

• A story row at the top of the home feed with the member's own stories, their friends' and the people they follow. The first tile is Create story; members with something not yet seen get a ring in the brand colour around their picture, and a small number shows how many stories they have.
• The Stories page at /stories (also in the side menu) shows everyone whose stories the member may see.
• Create → Story, or /stories/create, opens the full-screen creator:
  • Photo: JPG, PNG, GIF or WebP, with an optional caption. Portrait pictures look best.
  • Video: a short clip, up to the longest length you allow.
  • Text: words on a coloured background (the same backgrounds as coloured posts, or any colour of their own) in one of three fonts: Classic, Elegant or Typewriter.
  • Who can see it: Public or Friends.
• The viewer: progress bars at the top, tap the right side for the next story and the left side for the previous one, swipe sideways to jump to the next or previous member, hold a finger on the picture to pause. On a computer the arrow keys move, the space bar pauses, M turns the sound on and off and Esc closes.
• Reactions: ❤️ 😂 😮 😢 👏 🔥. The owner gets a notification, which follows the member's own setting for reactions.
• Replies: a reply box under every story that is not your own. The reply arrives as a private message in Messenger, so a story starts a conversation.
• Seen by: the owner of a story sees how many people watched it and who they were, with the reaction each one left.
• The ⋯ menu: Delete on your own story; Hide stories from … and Report on someone else's. Hiding takes that member out of the row and the Stories page without telling them.

A photo or a short text stays on screen for 5 seconds (a long text for 8), a video for its own length.

Who sees a story

A Public story is seen by every member who may see the owner's profile; a Friends story only by friends. When a member keeps their profile for friends only, their public stories also stay with friends. Members who blocked each other never see each other's stories. Stories are for signed-in members only; visitors see none.

Admins and moderators can open every story, which is what they need to act on a report.

Settings

Admin → Plugin pages → Stories.

A new length in A story lasts (hours) applies to stories posted from then on. The ones already up keep the end time they were given.

Photos and videos follow the upload limits of the site (Admin → Settings → Posts & uploads).

Numbers and the list of stories

The same page shows the active stories (photos, videos and texts), how many members have one, how many were posted, watched and reacted to today, the open reports, how many times members hid someone, and when the clean-up last ran.

Below is the list of every active story with a small preview, its owner, kind, privacy, views, when it was posted and when it ends. Click a preview to open it in the viewer. Delete removes a story with its file at once and writes it to the admin log. Stories brought over from WoWonder carry a WoWonder mark.

Reports

Members report a story from the ⋯ menu. The report arrives on Admin → Reports like any other, with a link that opens the story. Removing the content from there deletes the story.

Clean-up

The cron job Remove expired stories runs every 10 minutes. It deletes ended stories together with their photo or video file, their views, their reports and their notifications, so old stories take no space on the server. Remove expired stories now on the settings page runs it by hand. Without a working cron line ended stories still disappear from the row at once; only their files wait for the next run (see Scheduled jobs).

Coming from WoWonder

When the WoWonder Migration plugin runs, Stories brings over the WoWonder stories that have not ended yet, with their pictures, videos and who saw them. They keep their own end time and are shared with Friends. See Moving from WoWonder.

Tips

• On a busy site keep A story lasts (hours) at 24 and the video length short (15 to 30 seconds). Stories then stay light on storage and quick to load on mobile data.
• If stories turn into advertising, set Who can post stories to verified members for a while; existing stories stay up.