The suggestions post

[denise]

Soon (for certain values of 'soon'), there will be a "suggestions generator", where you fill out forms and it will post an entry to this community for you, for discussion and the like.

Until then, if you've got something you'd like to suggest for Dreamwidth, you can leave it as a comment here! You can review our development roadmap explanation first, since it includes a lot of our upcoming big projects.

The Suggestions Generator is now live! Please fill out that form instead.

Comments

Reading List Update Notification window

[elfy]

I use a webmail service that has a nifty feature.
I can click a link which opens a new, very small window (I can also open it as a tab). This window updates itself automatically every 3 minutes or so (and I can do so by hand) and tells me when there is a new message in my friends folder, in my unknown folder and even in my spam folder. This way, I tend to *not* reload my inbox every 5-10 minutes, as I often do it unless I'm distracted, but I just have an eye on that neat little window.

I would love to see something like this for my reading page on DW. Tracking the whole reading list is imho not the same thing, as it clogs up my mail account and my inbox.
I imagine this to be a paid feature.
I think semagic has or had a similar feature, where the pen started flashing, when there was an update. You could even tell it to flash only when a certain friendsgroup was updated. Thing is, I'm often at computers where I don't have semagic and thus I would prefer if something like this was implemented into DW.
I guess i would also help other people from not reloading their reading list every 5 minutes...

I can provide images of said notification window, if requested.

Re: Reading List Update Notification window

[oxoniensis]

I don't know if you use Firefox or not, but there's a Firefox addon called Livejournal Hook that gives you notification in the bar at the bottom of your browswer when you have new entries on your flist, or new messages. It does various other useful little things as well, so I'm desperately hoping a similar addon will be created for Dreamwidth. But something built into the site itself, rather than browser specific would be even better, if it's possible.

[twtd]

I think it would be awesome if on the manage entries page you could have it display entries between a range of dates (instead of just a specific date). Sometimes I know the week I posted something but not the exact date and clicking through the archive calender can get tedious. Just somethint tha tI thought would be useful.

[jamie]

Just so you know, right now if you click the name of the month you get a list of entries for that month rather than having to go day by day

[trobadora]

Some small suggestions:

Currently, the site scheme doesn't make a difference between clicked and unclicked links (although it does have a different link colour on hover). Could this be added? Currently, I find pages with many links, such as the profile page, very hard to navigate because of this.

The site scheme dropdown menu responds very very quickly - just moving your mouse across the page makes the dropdown come up. Could there be a bit of a lag so the menu would only open when you actually want it to open?

When you edit a post, the box containing the entry is substantially narrower than on the update page, frequently resulting in a horizontal scroll bar. (This has annoyed me on LJ for a long time.) Can this be changed?

[mskala]

Failing to distinguish visited and unvisited links is #3 on Jakob Nielson's Top 10 Web Design Mistakes...

Separate control of email and inbox notifications

[mskala]

See posting here. I'd like to be able to control whether I get any given notification by email, separately from whether I get it in my inbox. I gather (from the ensuing discussion on my linked posting) that there are technical issues making that nontrivial, but from a user perspective, that's what I want. At the very least, even without any changes in the options actually available, the user interface for the existing system could be much improved. For instance, to receive comment-reply notifications at all I must say I want them in my inbox AND by email, even though in fact I'm only allowed to have them by email and making that selection means I only get them by email. Choosing "just email" is locked out by the interface even though it is the practical result of choosing "inbox AND email".

Re: Separate control of email and inbox notifications

[dreamlittleyo]

I'm also in strong support of being able to activate notifications of comments via e-mail without having them sent to my on-site inbox, if something like that is possible. Having all notifications sent to my regular e-mail client (into which I am pretty much constantly signed in) works really well for me, while I prefer to keep my on-site inbox clear of the "minor" stuff so that I don't risk missing private messages and other specific things. This is the system that I find works best for me in my use of livejournal and insanejournal, and I would definitely appreciate being able to set my system here up this way. As it is, unless there's something I'm missing, the only way for me to receive e-mail notifications is to enable notifications for both.

Thanks so much!

Tweaks to style

[mskala]

I'm using Negatives Black, which was the default when I created my account, with minimal adjustment or customization. A few things I notice which I think other people would want too, universally enough for them to be reasonable to add to the default:

- I'd like to be able to go to my own user info page from my journal. There's a nice big icon I can click on to look at all my user pics (which I never want to do, at least not from there), there's my username right under it but that's unclickable, there are icons for subscribing to my updates (which I want to do once and then never again) or sending email to myself, but not for looking at my user info (which I frequently want to do). Similar considerations apply when I visit others' journals who are using this style. It'd be nice to have a "user info" link in the same area of the page. Normally there's a head-and-shoulders info link in front of every use of anyone's username, so it's surprising that there isn't one of those where the username appears on the person's own journal. I plan to put important information for potential readers into my user info page, so I'd like it to be easy for them to find it.

- It would be nice to have a "Previous" link at the bottom of the reading page so that I can keep going when I hit the bottom. At present there is one only at the top, where I have to search for it. I imagine something similar will apply to my journal's own page once I have 20 entries.

- There are date links at the bottom of my reading page (currently "April 1 2 3 4...") but they don't take me to Reading Page entries from those dates; they take me to my own entries from those dates. On the other hand, when I view someone else's journal who happens to be using the same style as me, they take me to that person's entries. This is confusing. I'd suggest not having them on the Reading Page at all. Something similar happens with the links at the top like "Recent entries". Maybe it'd be better to have it say something like "mskala's recent entries", or (better still) omit them from the Reading Page. When I see links for dates or archives or similar attached to a page, I generally expect them to refer to the page I'm looking at instead of some user account that may be in some way associated with that page.

Re: Tweaks to style

[trobadora]

I'd like to be able to go to my own user info page from my journal.

Negatives has a navigation bar right at the top of the page, which, among other things, links to the userinfo/profile. I see it on your journal - is that not working for you?

Default security level

[mskala]

Sorry about the multiple comments, but this is where it looks like suggestions are supposed to go, and I figure splitting different suggestions into different comments will make discussion easier.

It would be nice to be able to set a real default security level for postings. I mean that when I make a posting I want the pre-selected security level to be "Access list" but I still want to be able to set the posting to be public. At present, if I set a "default" it is actually a minimum and I will not be allowed to make any postings at less than the minimum security level - though I can edit them to a lower level once made. The current behaviour is apparently deliberate.

At the very least, if a real default can't be made available, the current behaviour should be consistently called a "minimum" more clearly and never a "default", since I thought I knew what a default was and I thought a default was what I was getting; also, disabled levels on the posting screen should be indicated in some more clear way than just greying them out (see linked thread).

Closely related: the existing features for comment screening and comment permission should be called defaults, since that's what they are; the present wording of the config page makes them sound like they will apply universally to all postings.

Re: Default security level

[florahart]

From your post (your link is bad there, by the way)

ETA: having posted that with "Access list" as the access level, I find that immediately afterward I can edit the entry and change its access to "Everyone (Public)". I think that means the grey-out during initial posting must have been a bug, because I can't see any way this behaviour would be intentional.

As Denise notes, it is intentional--it behaves the same way for communities, where the mod(s) can set a default/minimum. The reason this matters is, if the community has a rule about how things are posted (e.g., this community talks about sensitive personal topics, and people in it know this, so we all post everything locked), if someone posts unlocked and then other people are answering based on their certainty this is a post locked to comm members, it shouldn't be unlocked. However, if the mod goes to the poster and says HEY NOT COOL, the poster needs to not being able to claim inadvertentness of unlocking.

So, as a mod, I do like this behavior and want it to remain; however, I also do see your point that you see contexts in which you do want to be able to just change it in the first place. So, I think what you're asking for is a place to indicate which you have in mind, like,

Default security [drop-down box] Enforce as minimum? [ ] Yes [ ] No

[mikepictor.livejournal.com]

Any plans to producing an iPhone app for posting entries?

I have an LJ app (though I am not certain if it's LJ that authored it, or someone else), and it makes posting a whole lot simpler for me.

[denise]

We'd like to, yeah. We don't know a lot about iPhone development, but we're hoping someone out there does and can write an app for us.

[coffeeandink]

I'd like to be able to ban livejournal users, whether or not they've created an OpenID login yet. It would also be nice to be able to ban by IP address.

[beable]

Banning by IP address - I can see this solving temporary problems (e.g. spammers) but in the long run does it work for keeping someone out of your journal? People can change IP addresses pretty easily - quite apart from things like home connections often changing IP addresses periodically (my ADSL does almost every week it seems) than between home, work, and the anonymity of cafes/hotspots/etc I don't think you have a sure way of keeping a specific person out while maintaining a public journal.

Importing Memories

[beable]

Is it technically feasible to allow us to import memories? Or is the fact that they would be pointing cross-platform make this to hard to implement?

It's really my own posts that I have saved as memories that I want to preserve in particular (thus they have been imported to DW already).

Re: Importing Memories

[denise]

Yeah, that's precisely half of it -- the other half is that LJ doesn't export that data in any machine-readable format, so we'd have to screenscrape LJ to get it, and screenscraping = Bad (and leads to getting banned).

If we can figure out a way around the screenscraping thing, or figure out some way to do it lightly, what we'll probably do is grab the list, parse it into a nice bunch of categorized links, and post that as a private entry to your journal, tagged "imported memories" or something. But we have to figure out a way around the screenscraping thing first.

Having a hard time locating things

[jenrose]

Manage tools... plz to put them in top bar?

The homepage lacks functionality and I'm hoping that changes. I do like being able to skim the overall state of my journal there.


IMPORT BUTTON.... must haz it. I keep having to go find my notes on the stuff that got sent out via email to find the linky to the import function. I love how the import function works, for me, perfectly once I followed the initial rituals of make-import-work. Please to also make clear that re-importing the same journal does NOT result in duplicate posts on DW. Which I'm happy about, but was not sure of until I tried it.

Moar later, I keep stumbling on things, and now I know where to bitc---offer suggestions.

Re: Having a hard time locating things

[denise]

-- We have a new version of the logged-out homepage already coded, we're just holding off on releasing it until April 30, because it assumes we're already open for business. We have a new version of the logged-in homepage, with useful links and widgets etc, done as a mockup, but it hasn't been coded yet.

-- The import frontend as exists right now is totally a three-second "omg we need a frontend for this" hack. *g* There'll be a better one, and it will be linked in the appropriate places, by open beta.

Poll creator tweak

[word_geek]

Every time I created a poll in LJ, I had to go look up which was which between radio buttons and checkboxes. The only place I could find this info was in the write your own poll code bit. I never remembered, because I didn't do then that often.

If it's possible to put that detail in the FAQ for polls, that would be awesome.

Thanks

H

Re: Poll creator tweak

[pthalo]

buttons are button shaped (round), check boxes are box shaped.

Mass Icon uploader

[wide_worlds_joy]

Just a thought, but is there a way to do mass amounts of icons at one time? I have about 2000 icons on my HDD, and that is NOT a typo, and I'd love to have a tool that will let me upload, say, 20 or 30 at one time instead of one at a time.

Just a form with Location, Note and Comment, then the next line. A button to increase that to accommodate even more would be killer, but I can be happy with 30 at a time instead of just one.

I suggest this because of the Icon communities that will be springing up. There are a lot of people who create 30-80 icons in one group on a theme, then upload them. One of the things I HATED about LJ and IJ is that you can only upload them one at a time, which for a large batch could take a while.

Just a thought.

Re: Mass Icon uploader

[denise]

You can already do that, actually! We added it for that very reason. :)

Community tag management issues

[mskala]

"Manage tags" appears on my journal page, but not on the equivalent page for the community I admin. At first it appeared that I couldn't manage tags for the community at all. I was eventually able to get to it (by going to the user info and choosing it off the drop-down menu) but it would be nice to have it accessible in the same way as on my own journal.

Within "manage tags": strange highlighting of "used" tags on the list. This may or may not be a bug but it confused me. I created tags like "thoth", "waite", and "manara" (which refer to different tarot decks); then I learned about the "genus: species" syntax for tag grouping and decided to change to that, so I changed the tags on the posting. The old tags remained. I deleted them in "manage tags", which was fine, but then when I deleted the overall tag "decks", which at the time was unused, suddenly all the tags on the list lost their highlights and appeared unused. Frightened that that might make all my tags disappear, I added the overall tag back, and then the highlights were correct again. This suggests to me that there may be something not quite right in how the user interface manages the highlighting on the list.

Multiple e-mails listed in Community

[wistfuljane]

Is it possible to enter multiple e-mails for community? For cases where there are multiple administrators, but the community is rather casual and there's no need for a group e-mail to be created, it would be nice to just list multiple e-mails for contact instead of having to either 1) create a group e-mail or 2) list all the e-mails in the profile where's there no guarantee that they'll be scrambled against spam?

Merging tags

[unnique]

Would it be possible to merge tags? Say, if I didn't pay attention when I came up with tags for my journal and made two or three that basically are the same? Like, say, "huzzah!" and "huzzah". Instead of re-tagging all the posts involved, it would be neat to just go and merge the tags themselves. :)

Re: Merging tags

[kerravonsen]

Oh yes, I would really like this feature too!

[emperor]

I know I've said it elsewhere, but IWBNI closed-beta users could reserve a seed account if they're not going to be on-line around open-beta time.

Social networking services & sharing/bookmarking entries

[anniemoon]

I have two suggestions:

1. I like that I can add a few other services to my profile, like Twitter. Any chance of being able to add our links to even more of the bigger social networking sites, like Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Digg, etc?

2. Kind of related, I really love the AddThis or ShareThis widgets that can be found on blogs and a lot of websites these days, where you can bookmark something or share it on Delicious, Digg, Twitter, Reddit, etc. with just one click. It would be really awesome to have that available on each public entry. I guess it would be better as an opt-in thing for people who don't want to make it easy for their entries to be shared/bookmarked.

Re: Social networking services & sharing/bookmarking entries

[eva]

It should also be an opt-in for viewers (or there should be an opt-out) - in any case, it should be possible to get rid of it. I do not use any of those services, and I find the buttons obnoxious on websites which display them.

[lanterne_rouee]

This must be the proper place for the idea I put in one of the news posts. lol (And coolhunters.) Not trying to spam it around, but I figure I should put it in the right place now that I can.

I suggest, if it's possible, adding a feature to the moods/listening/location area of a post for reading/watching. Years ago, GreatestJournal and Xanga both had it. You'd enter the title and it would pull an icon-sized image of the cover and also link it back to Amazon.com.

IIUC, that involved licensing some sort of database (or database rights) from Amazon. Around that time was also the bubble of new sites solely dedicated to book collections, CD collections, etc. I think some of them licensed other databases instead, like the Library of Congress. No idea how expensive or inexpensive any of that is to do, or what other database options are available, but I loved the feature. Doing it manually when you post is possible but it's time consuming, so building it into the site would be awesome.

[cora]

Bonus if you use Amazon and I can enter in my associates account, and thus get money if people buy the books I mention.

multi-page comments navigation

[kerravonsen]

On posts where there are so many comments that they overflow into more than one page... currently, the link to the other comment pages is ONLY shown just after the post-content, between the post-content and where the comments start. What would be good would be if there was also a navigation link to the other comment pages at the very bottom of the page, because the most common method of reading the comments is to read all the comments on one page and then go to the next page, but currently, in order to do that, one has to scroll back to the start of the comments.

Re: multi-page comments navigation

[denise]

Yeah, that's a style-specific issue, and we've got a bug filed for it already! Thanks for letting us know. :)

[melina]

When someone hard-codes a font into their post -- <font face="whatever"> or <span style="FONT-FAMILY: whatever"> in their html, style=mine does not override it on LJ, and I am stuck with whatever godawful font they choose. I would like style=mine to override this somehow and display the post in my regular font.

I hope that makes sense! :)

[pthalo]

you can manually type ?nohtml=1 to the end of the url, (or &nohtml=1 if there's already a ? in the url), which will turn all html into codes. Though that can be potentially messy and difficult to read, if someone copy pasted from Microsoft Word into the rich text editor I think.

[jeeps]

in polls i've created, i've always been frustrated by the fact that i have to vote myself in order to view the votes others have made each time i load it. i would love for the default setting to immediately show poll results (rather than displaying all of the tickyboxes/radio buttons/etc), or possibly even an option in the poll creator to immediately start displaying results or to leave it open for the creator to vote.

[zvi]

You can just hit submit without voting on anything. I just learned that, like, two weeks ago, and already it has made my life better.

[chrismm]

Heh. So, this is something I just remembered I've wanted for years, reminded by having broken my style on LJ playing with new stuff. And keeping in mind that I'm not CSS girl, and not likely to be anytime soon--which I'm sure I'm not alone in.

I would LOVE the ability to save, at least, my existing theme/style settings, so if I hate what I changed it to, I can just click the Never Mind button and have what I had when I started, before I broke it all. *sigh*

Better yet, a function that lets me save the specs for a specific theme/style, with all the settings, under a name. With limits, like--I can save five themes or whatever. So when the winter holiday season hits, I can just pick the Bewitched Christmas theme I made the year before and voila! Good to go.

Also, y'all rock. :D

[afuna]

Oh, oh, I think you'll like http://www.dreamwidth.org/customize/advanced/styles.bml!

(Only available to paid users, though)

[dunv-i.livejournal.com]

This is the obligatory get rid of adult content filters post.

[afuna]

Bullet-point response to obligatory get rid of adult content filters post.


Adult content filters are still available on Dreamwidth, because they do serve a useful purpose, but in much modified form:

* The system is entirely voluntary. No one else can flag your entries or force your entries to be flagged adult

* The names of the levels have been changed, from "adult explicit" and "adult content", to 18+ and 14+ (though I think that they're eventually going to be renamed to 18+ and some variant of NSFW)

* You can give a reason for why you're flagging your journal/entry as adult, and it will show up on the interstitial page

Combined, I think that all three changes make the system neutral and useful, instead of creepy and policing.

[charmian]

1. When I track a post, "send email" is marked as default. I'd like the ability to make it so that the default is off (unchecked). This is because I like to have only comments in my journal/replies to my comments emailed to me, so that I don't mix up comments addressed to me or in my journal, and comments that have nothing directly to do with me.

2. When DW saves post drafts, the body is saved, but not the title of the post. I'd like it so that anything typed in the title box is also saved.

[sofiaviolet]

And tags, and the userpic associated with that post, and - basically everything.

[ames]

Would it be helpful to create a semi-official community for all the tutorials that have been popping up? I'm thinking this could hold people over until the documentation is completed.

[jamie]

You could point people at

[Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<user="getting_started">') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.]

You could point people at <user="getting_started">, both the people looking for tutorials and the ones writing them.

:)