Title
www.livejournal.com/?returnto=$URL should redirect to that $URL on page reload
Short, concise description of the idea
The returnto attribute on index.bml should work always if user is logged in, not just when that load of the page is used for logging in.
Full description of the idea
When one is not logged on, and goes to a locked post, one is redirected to
http://www.livejournal.com/?returnto=THE_URLENCODED_URL_OF_THE_LOCKED_POST_GOES_HERE, so one can log in there, and it will then automagically redirect you back to what you were trying to read.
Which means that if you have a bunch of tabs open, all with locked posts, and, say, your browser crashes, and then you bring your browser back up and your browser reopens all your tabs, but all of them redirect to www.livejournal.com. So you log in on one page, great, you're redirected back to the corresponding locked post. You're logged in now -- you should be able to hit refresh in each of those other tabs and have the "?returnto=" noticed and follow, and have them redirect back to the posts you now have access to.
But it doesn't work that way. Hitting refresh does nothing. You get to manually edit the URLEncoded URL back into shape to get back to the page you were on.
The more tabs you have open the more irritating this is. It's a little detail, but I suspect it's pretty trivial to add, and it would make the operation of the site that much smoother and more convenient.
An ordered list of benefits
- Recovery from browser crashes now cooperates more with the browsers' own efforts to recover from crashes.
- This message brought to you by NStar Electric, and the < one second power bounce we just had.
An ordered list of problems/issues involved
- Somebody will have to figure out where the "if logged in then redirect" statement goes in the page logic.