Spotlight user notifications

[dave173]

Title
Spotlight user notifications

Short, concise description of the idea
Ask and/or notify a user before putting him or her in the LiveJournal spotlight.

Full description of the idea
It may be a good idea to notify a prospective LiveJournal user of the opportunity to become spotlighted before placing them in full public view on the main LiveJournal page. Not everybody appreciates having themselves put in the spotlight. This idea was sparked by what happened to disneyjohanna's livejournal account once she was put in the spotlight unexpectedly. She was not ready for the publicity and went so far as to delete all of her entries, which shows that being suddenly and unexpectedly thrown into the spotlight isn't always beneficial.
An ordered list of benefits

• Users would have an opportunity to "clean up" their journals before the spotlight, ensuring that anything that was intended to be private was properly protected.
• Users would also have the time to fill in any missing information on their user info pages that they didn't think was important enough to add when they first began their journals on a smaller scale.
• It would possibly also give users the opportunity to ask *not* to be spotlighted, in case there was any reason why they would rather remain relatively private.

An ordered list of problems/issues involved

• Some users may capitalize on this warning and in knowing that they will soon be a "hot item", edit their journals to be entirely different from what was originally judged to be fit to be in the spotlight, or otherwise take advantage of the situation.
• If a waiting time is to be given before a user acknowledges, accepts, or rejects the spotlight "offer", there is always the chance that they will not respond for whatever reason. A policy might need to be created to define how to deal with these situations.
  
  

An organized list, or a few short paragraphs detailing suggestions for implementation

• The Spotlight decision process would have to be modified to account for the request and/or notification.
• The user could be contacted by any of the following methods:
  
  -using contact information publicly available in their user info page
  
  -a comment placed on their most recent entry
  
  -a "friend request" by a spotlight administrator with an explanation.
  
  -an invitation to a "spotlight community".