Title
Links on "You are not authorized to view this protected entry."
Short, concise description of the idea
The error message should have links to answer the questions "why?" and "how can I become authorized?" Those are the obvious questions, and there is no obvious answer to a new user.
Full description of the idea
If the entry is in a personal journal, the error message could be followed by "Why?" which would be an Ajax link to a brief explanation. (The person who posted the entry didn't make it public, you could ask them to add you as a friend,
FAQ link.) It would be helpful for the message to include a link to the journal's profile, because the current page has no link and doesn't even mention the username. We know how to view a journal or find the "add friend" link if we have an entry's URL, but new users don't always realize how to do it.
If it's in a comm, "join this community for access to its protected entries" and a join link would be sufficient; it wouldn't need as much explanation.
For logged-out users, neither of these would be useful, so a login link should be displayed instead.
We get support requests about this fairly often, from new users who don't know how to become authorized. The existing error message is only helpful to people who are already familiar with LJ's entry security options.
An ordered list of benefits
- Helps new users figure out the site
- Good site design: at the point where people will want to perform a certain action, the action should be convenient.
An ordered list of problems/issues involved
- Time and effort
- The current system might not make it easy to display different messages for comm vs personal journal or logged in vs not, or to add username-specific links to the error message.