Cross Posting

[thespian]

Title
Allow users to cross post something between journals.

Short, concise description of the idea
Frequently I post things that are of interest to several groups that I'm involved in. For example, next month at dragoncon, in atlanta, I'll be hosting a sleepover night which we'll be watching the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, so it will be of interest

Comments

[lucretio]

Don't mean to be anal. You might want to replace the period (.) with a slash (/). ; )

[thespian]

thanks. normally I notice that stuff right away, but as soon as I posted this I started getting the *grumble* 'server is busy' notice thingy.

[lucretio]

A lot of people don't like people cross-posted into communities they have in common. Another way to do this is to make on post and link all the other posts to the first. : )
Just a thought.

[lucretio]

Can you read that through the typos? : )

[halkeye]

I belive this idea was turned down a while ago when it was brought up in lj_dev
i don't want to look up the link, but if you go back a month or two, you'll find a posting by alanj about it...

This was mainly turned down (i belive) because of the example of usenet, and the mass amouts of people who cross post to the wrong groups and stuff...

But i could be mistaken about this whole thing, and alan might have been talkign about something else.. if so, i'm sorry

also

[eideteker]

We would have community maintainers (such as myself) asking for a "do not allow cross-posting" option.

Re: also

[thespian]

which would be why I mentioned one in my post ;-)

You get so used to just reading the comments

[eideteker]

Whaddaya know? Oh, well. I'll be over in the corner, drooling into a bucket.

[stephenbooth_uk]

Excellent idea!

I commented on the numbers of synonymous communities a couple of days ago ( http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?itemid=7870497 ).

I just had a look at the LJ schema. Currently each entry has a unique ID itemid which is the primary key on the log table (holds data like which journal an entry was posted in, who posted it, when it was posted &c) and on the logtext table.

As I see it (bear in mind that I am an Oracle DBA and don't know how the BML scripts behind LJ work or whether MySQL will suport this so am prepared to be told by those who do know those things that it won't work) the way to implement this would be to allow the clients to specify multiple ownerids and create multiple records with the same itemid in the log table, one for each ownerid. This would violate the primary key constraint so it would have to changed to a composite key, put it on itemid and ownerid would be the most obvious choice, can MySQL handle

[mart]

The first time this was proposed, back before LJ was open source and the suggestions community existed, my implementation idea went something like this: (now altered and a lot more specific since I understand how it all works a lot more)

The entries would be stored in the database as normal, but with a special logprop called master_post or somesuch, containing the itemid of the main post. logtext would only contain a record for the first one, and entries without a logtext record would be assumed to be crossposts and the property checked for the 'master' itemid.

When creating talklinks, the master post could be linked to instead, or talkread could be made to show the comments attached to the master event rather than the event actually requested. This keeps all of the comments in one place.

Finally, multiple copies of the same cross-posted post would be ignored on the friends page, showing only the first one it comes to. (Can't just use the master event, because that journal might not be on the friends list while another is)

The