Tracking comments made by specific user

[eyesofstrength]

Title:
Tracking comments made by specific user

Area:
tracking

Summary:
A way to get a notification sent to email or DW inbox when a particular user comments to a post. For example, tracking responses that denise makes to a news post since she always has useful things to say.

Description:
While the current tracking and notification options are definitely great, there are a few things that are missing and could lead to possibly missing out on important things from people you want to watch.

While at times this could be accomplished by tracking a tag in a community, if the tag isn't there when the entry is posted, that notification method doesn't work. Plus there is no way to find when someone has commented to an entry outside of tracking all comments to an entry, or top level comments.

So what I propose is a way to track in a post or community comments made by specific users. This could be very useful in things like roleplaying communities to track characters important to yours, or to track mod posts. In communities like art or fic ones, someone can track when a particular artist or writer posts. And I'm sure there are other usages that I'm forgetting.

In posts, it could be useful to add to top level comments to get responses to questions people may have from official sources. Or in a request community, to see when a particular person fills a request. Or in roleplay communities, to get only responses from people your character would definitely respond to so you don't miss them, or to see when characters you like reading respond to others as well.

While this could be accomplished with top level comment tracking or comment tracking in a post, that is going to send a lot of excess notifications before you get the one you need. If 100+ people post to a particular post and you want to know when 2 people in particular post, that's over 98 notifications you don't need. Or if you are interested in only the official responses, you'll get a lot of excess by tracking a whole post, especially if questions and answers is only a small part.

And for tracking when someone posts to a community, there is tag tracking, but that only covers if the tag was there when the post was made, not if it was added later, and plenty of people are forgetful about adding tags when making the post. Also, the tag has to exist to track, and other users besides the one you are interested in may post with that tag as well.

Obviously refreshing a post or community can do it as well, but that is definitely time consuming and if the person you are wanting to see responses from only posts every now and then, a lot of wasted time.

One thing that could be a concern is privacy, so obviously I'd like to say that I don't support this being a way to know when someone posts something that is locked or screened and you cannot see it. It should only allow for notifications of things posted that you can actually see with the journal doing the tracking. So if a community is members-only, you can only track like this if you are a member. Basically, stuff you'd be able to see by refreshing the community or post, this is meant only to save time.

Not going to suggest a particular way to implement this because honestly, I'm no coder and someone may well have a better idea than I may to make this work. I'm just giving what I'd like to see on how it is used and the specifics on how to make it work I'll leave to people far smarter than me. Of course if anyone has any ideas on how to do this without added features, that's great too!

Poll #9209 Tracking comments made by specific user

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 77

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
26 (33.8%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
8 (10.4%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
26 (33.8%)

(I have no opinion)
16 (20.8%)

(Other: please comment)
1 (1.3%)

Comments

[erik]

Stalker, much?

There is more to privacy than keeping hidden posts hidden. Being able to easily index and see every public utterance of a particular person would be a huge boon to stalkers and other people with an unhealthy interest in someone.

[cheyinka]

What if it were just comments posted to a given entry? That way, if I already know that username has posted a comment at least once to dw-suggestions.dreamwidth.org/90000000000000.html, I can be notified the next time e comments on that entry, instead of having to be notified for every comment anyone makes, but I don't get to see all of username's comments everywhere.

[deborah]

this is actually what I even assumed to be original request was, because it's what makes sense. I don't want to know every comment Denise makes everywhere, but I can see wanting to know every comment Denise makes in a particular news post. Besides, you can already track comments to a post, so this is basically tracking comments to a particular post with a filter added on top of it. I think that if you did it this way it wouldn't be a particular privacy issue at all.

But every comment a particular user makes anywhere, in the whole of dreamwidth? Yes, that would be a huge privacy issue.

[cheyinka]

Also, it could be a lot of work for the servers, especially for really prolific commenters. I mean, if someone opted in to being tracked that way, and it wouldn't stress the servers, I wouldn't have too much of a problem with it, but it would still feel weird.

[denise]

I've always hated this idea as super privacy-invading and stalkeriffic -- on LJ when the notification system was first created we had huge discussions about what would be useful vs what would be stalkeriffic. I actually made a matrix to broadly categorize subscriptions into "broad" vs "narrow" actions, and "in user's own space" vs "in other spaces", that really helped categorize what I thought was OK vs what I thought was "omg stalker!".

However, I could see how this would be really beneficial to RP-related use and other use cases where there's no expectation of privacy and where there's an expectation that broadcasting your every move, and being able to subscribe to someone else's every move, is beneficial (rather than stalkeriffic). Thinking about it from that use case, I would probably not object (on a fundamental level, I mean) to allowing people to specifically opt in to having their comments tracked universally like this. (Even though opt-in is generally a bad choice for discoverability of features.)

For instance, maybe I wouldn't mind people subscribing to notifications of comments posted by denise because theoretically that's only used for official DW business (although I'm kind of sloppy about that sometimes when reading Latest Things), but I'd be really creeped out by people subscribing to any comment I posted (visible to them of course) as synecdochic, since that's my personal account and I do all my commenting to friends there. But if I did roleplay, I can easily see wanting to allow people to subscribe to notifications of any comment I post publicly (or with a security level they can see) as an RP account, which account would presumably only be used for RP-related activity and therefore has zero expectation of privacy.

[cheyinka]

I definitely think any "every comment left by this user anywhere" variant should require opting in before someone's comments could be tracked that way, and I don't know where I stand on "every comment left by this user in this community" or "every post made by this user to this community" - I can see the utility, but those do feel awfully broad. On the other hand, "every comment left by this user on this entry" seems a lot narrower to me - someone could already get notifications for "every comment left on this entry", after all.

[azurelunatic]

I find the difference in feel of ownership/connection between subscription/no subscription to be immense. So that could be a thing.

Also my feelings differ by location. I am ok with tracking in official comms for my comments, not in my own journal.

(apologies for spelling, meds kicking in.)

[ariestess]

Yeah, I'd have to agree on the stalker connotation here.

[opusculus]

I'm not strongly opposed to this enough to vote no, but it's something I would find a bit disconcerting to think about, and has the potential to stir up a fair amount of wank. Most obviously, notifications would be abused by allowing people to easily stalk someone particular in a community, for things like let's find fault with every single thing she says. Less obviously, it encourages cliqueishness, by making it easy for people to only look at posts that their friends care enough to comment and generally coordinate themselves to the exclusion of other people.

I don't think it would be good for DW's community, honestly. Too much potential for abuse, not enough benefit.

[melannen]

See above about: stalkeriffic.

I already know people who refuse to comment on any journals that are indexable because they have stalkers who google-search their username and record everything they say in order to harass them with it. If this was implemented, such people wouldn't be able to use DW at all.

If a lot of people want it, I can see how it would be useful (for things like above, with the staff accounts) with three conditions: accounts you have banned cannot track you at all; you can turn off tracking of yourself, and it's off by default; you can see a list of who is tracking you. Otherwise I oppose it strongly.

By-entry only (or, for posts, by-community only for communities where you're a member, whether they're members-only or not) as people described above might be slightly more reasonable - I can see that working as an extension of entry tracking.

[eva]

accounts you have banned cannot track you at all

That precaution sadly wouldn't do much at all, except to give people a wrong sense of security, as it would be incredibly easy to circumvent by just creating another account.

All in all, I can see this as having its uses on a per-post basis, or to track a community moderator's responses in their own community, but anything more would be very problematic.

[melannen]

That's the problem with all uses of banning, sadly. Creating new accounts for ban-evasions is still a Terms of Use violation, though, afaik, so if you could prove they'd done it, you could get them banned from the whole site. Which is why you'd need to see who was tracking you in conjuction with that, so you could keep an eye on people tracking you and notice if it looked like there was somebody evading a ban.

...it would probably be easier to just turn off tracking though, yes.

[susanreads]

This seems to have been taken to imply tracking everything someone posts globally. I'd be against that!

On a specific post: OK as long as people get the chance to say (at a journal level) that they don't want to be tracked that way. Tracking official responses in news posts is a great idea.

Posts in a community: only if it's opt-in. People will opt in with their RP accounts, I guess.

[aedifica]

My "I have no opinion" here is "my feelings are so mixed that it works out to about neutral on average."

[montuos]

+1

[kaberett]

+1

[ninetydegrees]

Noting that something a bit similar but much more specific has been suggested and migrated: http://dw-suggestions.dreamwidth.org/28105.html.

[thejeopardymaze]

No.

[ochibashigure]

I think this could potentially be Very Useful, but there needs to be limitations and changes to avoid the stalking issue.

I've been stalked and harassed online before, it is very disruptive and damaging on multiple levels to say the least. But I still see merit in this suggestion.

If this were an opt-in feature. If it has some user control like DW messaging (like only allowing people I give access to the ability to track my comments in communities). If it was post specific (not all posts in a community, but post-by-post). If there was a way to see who was tracking your comments, plus notification when tracking begins. If there was a way to approve/deny someone tracking you, or at least revoke tracking after being notified of it. If using the feature meant your IP address was logged, whether or not that option is selected (to help deter stalkers, although I know there are ways around it). And other things mentioned.

Comments to specific entries can already be tracked. I see this as an extension of that really. Giving each individual the option to allow their comments to be tracked or not I think still allows for something like this to be used while helping preserve personal control.

[kyrielle]

I think the ability to track any time user X comments to post Y is fine, as long as it's only supported when you could track any time *anyone* commented to post Y.

I think the ability to track any time user X posts to community Y is fine, as long as it's supported only for posts you'd see if you were tracking any time *anyone* posted to the community.

I can see the utility of tracking "any time user X comments to any post in community Y" - but if it were done, I'd want it to be a setting on the community whether or not it was supported. It would make sense for communities like news and roleplay communities, but it might be a very bad idea for some other community types (supporting people with issues, etc.). There should be a warning to users when they comment in such communities that such tracking is possible, if it's done.

[cheyinka]

I agree with all of this. :)

[pipisafoat]

+1

[msilverstar]

This is definitely tricky, and it seems like more exposure than tracking in general. At the very least, it should be explicit opt-in per commenter on journals set to lower search visibility.

But maybe we need to express this in a different way, some kind of choice to broadcast vs. narrowcast. So public RP journals and kinkmemes and meta community discussions have one set of expectations and very visibly express those expectations.

[vangirl]

I think the potential for problems re: stalking is greater than the potential boon it could be in RP. If I want someone to comment to my character, I'm able to contact specific players through a wide variety of means or make an open request on Plurk or IRC with a link to the comment in question. However, as someone who has dealt with stalking and harassment online on LJ, I would not want someone to have the ability to track every comment I've made, even in public posts. (Especially in public, as I've had people find comments I've made in anonymous-enabled communities and have been harassed there.)

So, yeah. This idea makes me very uncomfortable and that's my reason for voting no.

[cesy]

Where it's a subset of a tracking option that's already available, I think this should be allowed. Where it's something more than that, it would need to be opt-in for the person being tracked.

[luciferous]

My "with changes":

I read this as just tracking a particular user's comments in one specific post, which I think could be really useful for RP purposes and wouldn't be too stalkeriffic. So I would support that idea, and maybe the idea to track all of a person's comments to a particular community, since that could be helpful for RP purposes as well if there's a particular character you're following.

The idea of tracking all of a particular user's comments across the whole site, though... Yeah, that's getting creepy. Even for RPers I can't think of an immediate way that that would be useful; it's an inherently public hobby and some amount of people tracking your character is to be expected, sure, but tracking someone everywhere they could possibly comment sounds pretty stalkery even for us. There might be someone who RPs differently than what I'm used to who could benefit from it, but I think the risks would still outweigh benefits. At the very least there would have to be a way for someone to opt out of having their comments tracked, or make it opt-in only like someone else suggested.