Comments | suggestions: Subject Line Editing in Comms

court1429 in suggestions

Subject Line Editing in Comms

Sep 28, 2010 12:16

Title
Subject Line Editing in Comms

Short, concise description of the idea
Allow maintainers to edit a subject line in a community post.

Full description of the ideaAs new maintainers of our search comm, we've implemented a firm "specific subject line must be added" rule which everyone cooperates with. Older posts weren't held to this standard and so ( Read more... )

communities, entry editing, community maintenance, § no status

Comments 16

boredinsomniac October 13 2010, 06:42:04 UTC

Previous suggestions:
http://community.livejournal.com/suggestions/790175.html November 2007, subject only
http://community.livejournal.com/suggestions/907769.html July 2008, various parts of entry

Most of the issues raised were about people not wanting anyone else to be able to edit any of their content, even the subject. There were also concerns that the poster could be held responsible for something that the maintainer had added to the subject.

In the November suggestion, in response to these concerns, the poster commented with a revised idea: allow community maintainers to apply a secondary summary to the entry to make searches easier.

brilliant_blue October 13 2010, 07:09:35 UTC

I didn't know about the previous suggestions but I like the general idea, sometimes when I need to find information in the archives, it takes so long because there are too many entries having irrelevant titles or without even a subject so I have to check them all -_-

If people don't want maintainers to be able to edit the subjects or add a summary, could we at least discuss the option of compulsory subjects ?

For example, you want to post an entry on a community having this option, if you don't write a subject title, when clicking on the posting button you'll get an error message, something like :
"this community requires a descriptive subject, please give a title to your entry"

Of course some people could still write stupid/undescriptive sujbects but not all of them and at least we wouldn't have all those "(no suject)" in the archives anymore.

fiddlingfrog October 13 2010, 07:12:15 UTC

I'm just a little unclear on how searching by entry subjectline is more efficient than searching by tags.

andy October 13 2010, 07:17:52 UTC

Subject lines, if present, are generally more informative, and you can use month view to get a digest of what was posted in a while.

charliemc October 13 2010, 07:32:05 UTC

Quite true!

Thread 12

mlady_rebecca October 13 2010, 20:28:40 UTC

Sounds like a good idea to me.

court1429 October 14 2010, 17:46:18 UTC

Question about the process. How does one's suggestion get implemented by LJ? We're having the discussion here, but I don't know how that might translate to moving up the chain to implementation.

boredinsomniac October 29 2010, 06:15:21 UTC

Hi, I'm Maura, the Suggestions maintainer! Sorry it took me so long to respond to your question.

There are two ways that a suggestion may end up being implemented. The first is through various people on staff who watch the community. You may see them comment sometimes with their own thoughts, or with input on the technical feasibility of a suggestion. At times, they also recommend suggestions they notice.

This means that although there are too many suggestions for staff to have a detailed discussion of each one, virtually all posted suggestions are seen by staff and can be moved forward if someone on staff thinks the idea would be feasible and beneficial.

The second way is that sometimes staff will request a list of suggestions that should be given further consideration. At that point I work with the Suggestions staff contact, coffeechica, to put together a list and send it in, and staff will evaluate the suggestions based on issues raised in discussions, as well as their own knowledge about the benefits and drawbacks of the idea and the ( ... )