Icon petition - draft of suggestion
The number of 'signatures' on the icon petition has dried up to a trickle now, so I would like to get the idea submitted to livejournal staff. I'm going to present it to suggestions, but I'd be really grateful if one or two of you would check over my submission, see if there are any glaring omissions, or if it could be made clearer. (I don't want to substantially alter the idea though, as this is the idea that people signed in agreement to on the petition.)
The format below is fixed: to post on suggestions, you have to use the Suggestion Proposal Generator For those who are interested, this is what will happen once the suggestion is made.
Title
Paid members to use 100MB disk space to allow for more userpics
Short, concise description of the idea
Allow paid members to trade some of their 100MB of space (currently available for phone posts and picture hosting) for extra userpics.
Full description of the idea
Paid accounts have 100 MB of space available for phone posts, picture hosting and icons. It appears to be shared between the three areas, although obviously we have an extra limitation on icons, unrelated to the disk space. However, many people have their own picture hosting, so don't require that service, and are unable to use phone posting because of a lack of a local phone number. Hence, we're paying for services that we simply don't want.
I would like to see an option that allows paid account users to use this disk space to give us more of what we want and less of what we don't want.
I proposed this idea on my journal, and it met with extremely enthusiastic support. So far, over 3,300 paid members have 'signed' the online petition.
PETITION
An ordered list of benefits
A lot of paid users want more userpics. This would be a practical way of providing them.
Those who like the current system would not have to make any changes, so customers who want to make phone posts or use the picture hosting will not be adversely affected in any way.
An ordered list of problems/issues involved
It's not simply a matter of diskspace, but also bandwidth, so a direct exchange of space wouldn't be possible, as userpics presumably use a relatively greater amount of bandwidth than the other services. I have suggested a solution to this below.
A new management page would be required in the Livejournal Scrapbook area.
An organized list, or a few short paragraphs detailing suggestions for implementation
One example of a way of implementing: if the 100 MB disk space were split up into 10 MB chunks, one could keep some set aside for phone posts/picture hosting and exchange six of the 10 MB chunks for 6x icons, where x is some figure that livejournal staff feel would be a fair offer, based on bandwidth usage etc. So users could keep all the space for phone posts, all for a mixture of phone posts and picture hosting, exchange all of it for userpics, or some combination to suit the user.
At the moment, paid users have 15 userpics, with the option of purchasing an extra 50. This option of paying for extra icons could be incorporated into the current system by allowing those who have not paid extra, say, x icons per 10MB chunk, and those who have paid for extra icons and permanent account holders 4x icons per 10MB chunk. This would minimise the alterations to the current system. (N.B. The figures given here are simply random suggestions, used to give an idea of the way the system could work).
ETA: I've made the suggested alterations and am now waiting to see if the maintainers of suggestions will approve the post.
Mini PSA
One thing that isn't very clear about the tag system is that you can only view a maximum of 100 posts per tag. So if, for example, you label all your fanfiction posts 'fiction', and tag more than 100 posts, you'll only be able to see the most recent 100 posts. Hopefully the limit will be removed, but it's worth bearing in mind for the time being, if you're going back and adding tags to old posts.