Hi Stephen,

It's always good to get feedback and suggestions from someone using the system. 

Adding and showing pictures in status updates was added in version 1.0.8. Status updates notifications work like in any other area: when someone posts a status update they can select who to share it with and any attached file (picture) inherits permissions of this status update. If the majority of status updates normally get shared with a specific audience, users can set default sharing in their preferences. With the default sharing, every time someone creates a new status update "Share with" field will be pre-filled with the audience from their sharing preferences. By audience I mean any combination of groups, users, tenants, etc. This "Share with" field can be edited at any time even if there is default sharing set.

Getting status update to show in activity stream is actually not up to a person sharing it. Totara Social has a very fine-grained and flexible notification settings page. Anyone can decide where they would like to get a notification about things happening in the system: activity stream (also called homestream), email, local inbox, or email digest. It all depends on how users prefer to interact with the system, someone might be more inclined to using email rather than checking their activity stream.

If you had a chance to look around the system, you might have noticed that there is a group activity stream. Users can post their status updates inside the group area and they will be automatically shared with this group by default.

As for renaming things in the system, it is done through language packs and when needed you can localise your language pack. This would be a better idea than just changing some strings in it. I couldn't find any information on how to do that on our help site, but I will make sure we add it there ASAP.

Adding attachments to questions/ideas is not implemented yet. We are working on adding filebrowser to a rich text editor and might be adding an option to embed/add images to all content types in Totara Social. I will try keep you updated on the progress of this feature. It might be a good idea to open a feature request in helpdesk to make sure that you get notified when this is implemented.

I hope this helps. Please feel free to message me if you have any more questions.

Yuliya