markf
in
lj_feedback
More Q & A
Here's a few more:
luckycyberbunny -- Say I do a project for school or something, and I get a bunch of people signed up for LJ... do I get an honor or something?
We don't have anything official in place for something like this, but we have discussed something similar to it in the past. To my knowledge, it's not something currently in the works, but that doesn't mean it'll never happen either. With the way LiveJournal's account types are setup, chanced are something like this would have to be restricted to referring new people who end up with paid account, otherwise it could be abused by people fairly easily.
paperstar -- Why don't you allow users to change usernames for free up to a certain number of times?
Username changes are something we want to discourage people from doing lightly, which has always been the reason for there being a cost to renaming. It can cause a lot of confusion among someone's friends, and is generally something we only want people to do if they just can't stand that username they picked years ago, but dont want to lose all of their entries by creating a new journal with the username they want.
phadguy -- Could I buy LJ/6A (assuming I had the cash)?
Probably not, but I'm sure every website has it's price. ;)
sunkistsoda -- how about making an easier suggestion system?
I don't think the suggestions system itself is currently difficult, the thing that makes it hard in some cases is the sheer number of suggestions that already exist. I'm not really sure there's any other system that would make this any easier to handle, but if you have any ideas on how to improve it, feel free to suggest them!
starletfallen -- Have you ever considered giving Frank the Goat a cohort? Like... an evil bunny of doom or something?
But Frank is so incredibly awesome as is, what cohort could possibly do anything other than diminish his greatness?
darkenedminds -- I hate that users can add my 99% friendsonly LJ to their friends list without my consent - particularly troll journals. is there any feature in the works to make friending between users a consentual thing? Make a friends request, then accept/decline?
When someone adds you to their friends page, it doesn't give them access to your friends only entries. It just means any entries you post that you've given them access to read will show up on their friends page, which is what they could see just by looking at your journal. I think the problem with this is the simple fact that everything's referred to as "friends", which brings on the next 3 questions:
efbq -- When will I be able to rename 'friends' and 'friend of' on my info page?
kineticfactory -- What happened to the proposal to split the "friend" relation into separate trust/subscription relations?
natalief -- Why on *earth* is it called a Friends list?
The origin of the whole friends page/friends list came from way back when the site was created with the intent of friends being able to keep in touch with each other. There weren't any other sites like this out there yet, and a lot of the problems that are now around nobody really anticipated then. At the time, nobody thought that just because I want to read someone's journal doesn't mean I want them reading mine.
We've discussed splitting up friends relations in the past, and it's still something we'd like to do at some point, but we just haven't had the time to squeeze it in. For the people who haven't followed this in the past, the issue is that adding someone to your friends list currently does 2 things: It allows you to view that person's entries on your friends page (the entries they've given you access to view, that is), and it allows them access to any entries you've posted using the 'Friends Only' security level.
The idea here was to split it up so that you could subscribe to someone's journal without having to let them view your friends only entries, or grant them access to view your Friends Only entries without having theirs show up on your friends page. Technically, you can do all of this already if you use custom filters and edit the "Default View" filter, or use the notification system but that seems like too much work for fairly basic functionality, and we'd like to eventually change it. It's one of those things I can't say we have any sort of ETA on, but it's definitely something we're still planning on doing.
As to actually having the ability to rename 'friends' and 'friend of' (or whatever they might be changed to in the future), it's probably unlikely that users would be given the ability to edit the actual names of these fields. If this were possible, it woudln't be long before people started changing 'friends' to things along the line of 'idiots' and start adding people they dont like or just as many random people as they can find. We'll likely pick standard wording for these, but we'll make sure to pick a term that's less loaded than "Friends" is!
luckycyberbunny -- Say I do a project for school or something, and I get a bunch of people signed up for LJ... do I get an honor or something?
We don't have anything official in place for something like this, but we have discussed something similar to it in the past. To my knowledge, it's not something currently in the works, but that doesn't mean it'll never happen either. With the way LiveJournal's account types are setup, chanced are something like this would have to be restricted to referring new people who end up with paid account, otherwise it could be abused by people fairly easily.
paperstar -- Why don't you allow users to change usernames for free up to a certain number of times?
Username changes are something we want to discourage people from doing lightly, which has always been the reason for there being a cost to renaming. It can cause a lot of confusion among someone's friends, and is generally something we only want people to do if they just can't stand that username they picked years ago, but dont want to lose all of their entries by creating a new journal with the username they want.
phadguy -- Could I buy LJ/6A (assuming I had the cash)?
Probably not, but I'm sure every website has it's price. ;)
sunkistsoda -- how about making an easier suggestion system?
I don't think the suggestions system itself is currently difficult, the thing that makes it hard in some cases is the sheer number of suggestions that already exist. I'm not really sure there's any other system that would make this any easier to handle, but if you have any ideas on how to improve it, feel free to suggest them!
starletfallen -- Have you ever considered giving Frank the Goat a cohort? Like... an evil bunny of doom or something?
But Frank is so incredibly awesome as is, what cohort could possibly do anything other than diminish his greatness?
darkenedminds -- I hate that users can add my 99% friendsonly LJ to their friends list without my consent - particularly troll journals. is there any feature in the works to make friending between users a consentual thing? Make a friends request, then accept/decline?
When someone adds you to their friends page, it doesn't give them access to your friends only entries. It just means any entries you post that you've given them access to read will show up on their friends page, which is what they could see just by looking at your journal. I think the problem with this is the simple fact that everything's referred to as "friends", which brings on the next 3 questions:
efbq -- When will I be able to rename 'friends' and 'friend of' on my info page?
kineticfactory -- What happened to the proposal to split the "friend" relation into separate trust/subscription relations?
natalief -- Why on *earth* is it called a Friends list?
The origin of the whole friends page/friends list came from way back when the site was created with the intent of friends being able to keep in touch with each other. There weren't any other sites like this out there yet, and a lot of the problems that are now around nobody really anticipated then. At the time, nobody thought that just because I want to read someone's journal doesn't mean I want them reading mine.
We've discussed splitting up friends relations in the past, and it's still something we'd like to do at some point, but we just haven't had the time to squeeze it in. For the people who haven't followed this in the past, the issue is that adding someone to your friends list currently does 2 things: It allows you to view that person's entries on your friends page (the entries they've given you access to view, that is), and it allows them access to any entries you've posted using the 'Friends Only' security level.
The idea here was to split it up so that you could subscribe to someone's journal without having to let them view your friends only entries, or grant them access to view your Friends Only entries without having theirs show up on your friends page. Technically, you can do all of this already if you use custom filters and edit the "Default View" filter, or use the notification system but that seems like too much work for fairly basic functionality, and we'd like to eventually change it. It's one of those things I can't say we have any sort of ETA on, but it's definitely something we're still planning on doing.
As to actually having the ability to rename 'friends' and 'friend of' (or whatever they might be changed to in the future), it's probably unlikely that users would be given the ability to edit the actual names of these fields. If this were possible, it woudln't be long before people started changing 'friends' to things along the line of 'idiots' and start adding people they dont like or just as many random people as they can find. We'll likely pick standard wording for these, but we'll make sure to pick a term that's less loaded than "Friends" is!