Include subscribers in "screen comments from people not on your access list"

[tim]

Title:
Include subscribers in "screen comments from people not on your access list"

Area:
comments

Summary:
Right now the options for comment screening are "never", "anonymous comments", "people not on your access list", or "always". I want to change "people not on your access list" to "people on neither your access list nor your subscriber list".

Description:
I'm not sure how other people use automatic screening, but I use it to discourage abusive / derailing comments. If someone is on *either* my access list or my subscriber list, I probably trust them not to make such comments. So I suggest, in the "Comment screening" menu in "My Account Settings", changing the "people not on your access list" option to also exempt people on your subscriber list from auto-screening.

An alternative suggestion is to just add one more option to the list: "people not on your access list or your subscriber list", and leave the other options as-is. I prefer the first solution for simplicity, but either way is OK.

I don't see any drawbacks to the latter option except that adding more options to the list makes that part of the account settings harder to understand. The drawback to the former option is that someone might want to auto-screen comments from people they subscribe to but who they don't trust enough to grant access to. However I don't know if anyone actually does want to or not.

Edit: Since this is apparently unclear, "your subscriber list" means the people you choose to subscribe to. You choose who to subscribe to. Everybody on your subscriber list is someone you chose to subscribe to and can unsubscribe from.

Poll #10451 Include subscribers in "screen comments from people not on your access list"

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 57

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
10 (17.5%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
3 (5.3%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
30 (52.6%)

(I have no opinion)
11 (19.3%)

(Other: please comment)
3 (5.3%)

Comments

[ratcreature]

To me this makes no sense, because I don't have any control over who subscribes to me, so there is no trust nor a guarantee that is isn't spammers or trolls, whereas I pick whom I give access.

[tim]

Your subscriber list is the list of people you subscribe to, and you control that. You choose who you subscribe to.

[ratcreature]

But that group doesn't really have anything to do with the ones that read my journal and comment, so an option mixing those people with the access list seems even more confusing to me. Subscribers in the context of people who comment in my journal I understood to mean people who subscribe to me, not the people who I read. And I read plenty of people whom I don't know, so I don't want to mix that with trust aspects of the access list.

[tim]

I just mean that if me and "Alice" have a mutual subscription but not a mutual access relationship (we read each other's public posts but we aren't close enough friends to read each other's friends-only posts), I probably don't need to auto-screen Alice's comments; if we're mutual subscribers, I probably trust her enough not to say anything awful even if I don't trust her with my friends-only content. If I subscribe to Alice, I probably don't need to be afraid that she will post something that is too awful to have the rest of the world see.

[ratcreature]

I could see that as an additional option, but not instead of the access list only option. That should still be there without this expansion.

[havocthecat]

+1

[kerravonsen]

+1 This is my "with changes".

[ninetydegrees]

+1

[tim]

As I said above: "Your subscriber list is the list of people you subscribe to, and you control that. You choose who you subscribe to."

[ninetydegrees]

I read all comments before plussing RT's. I agree with their reasoning. Thanks for telling me, though.

[inthetatras]

I would not be against an option regarding mutual subscribers if there were enough benefit sitewide for it, but I don't think that the option "people not on your access list" should be messed with. If need be, you can always use multiple filters for those on your access list. That's what those are there for.

[montuos]

+1 — I don't object to adding an option for subscribers in addition to access list (neither am I actively for this option, mind you), but I do strongly object to using that to replace the existing option for access list.

[inthetatras]

Yeah. Replacing it would cause problems for the people who only want to screen comments from those not on their access list.

[deborah]

Ultimately, all in access list is in the definition of "people I trust". There may be a difference between "people I trust to be sensible in a comment thread" and "people I trust to know that I am angry at my boss". But there is also a difference between "people I trust to know that I am angry at my boss," "people I trust to know that I am having an abortion," and "people I trust to know that I just got arrested for selling cocaine out of the backseat of my car." That is what access filters are for. They can be a pain to manage -- and I'm pretty sure that figuring out a better way to manage them is already on many people's minds -- but that is what they are for, distinguishing between the different levels of people that you trust.

[tim]

Yeah, personally I'm against any solution that amounts to "just use filters" -- because I've been burned too badly by filters in the past on LiveJournal, and I don't see their essential error-prone-ness having changed here on DW. It's fine for filters to be there, but the site should make sense without using them. And having comments by people whose journals you've chosen to subscribe to go in the moderation queue doesn't make sense to me.

[matgb]

You've chosen to subscribe to them but not trust them. I subscribe to people that interest me, including people that interest me because I don't trust them.

If you want to give someone a degree of trust, trust them, that's why the settings were separated. If there's a problem with filters (and the UI is a problem), then that's a separate issue, there is a working solution to your problem, if it's not workign for you as well as intended then we need to fix that, not change the definition of trust or have inconsistent usage.

Your rationale is that if you subscribe to someone by default you trust them to be sensible in comments, I know that some people I may chose to subscribe to are people I would explcitly not trust in comments, that's why I don't trust them or grant them access.

If Filters are your problem, then that needs resolving, the solution to your problem exists already but isn't good enough for you, let's fix that instead.

[tim]

The problem with filters, as I see it, is that Dreamwidth is unaware of the connection between multiple accounts controlled by the same person, and I don't see a way to change that other than forbidding multiple accounts by policy (something I don't think most people would like; I wouldn't like it, since I have more than one account). As long as one person can have > 1 account, it's too easy to filter someone out but forget to exclude all their accounts.

[foxfirefey]

An option for people not in your circle could be added, but the option itself CANNOT be changed. The entire reason for the friends split into subscribe and access was so you could subscribe to people without needing to give them access to trusted things, otherwise there's not much point in the split. Changing this on people who may be relying on this distinction is a bad move.

[tim]

But this suggestion doesn't involve giving anyone access to anything new. It's about what happens when they comment on something they already have access to.

[foxfirefey]

Well, they already had access to read it--just like any member of the public since it's logically a public entry, since they don't have access. By that logic, any reader at all should be able to get through the screening, because they already had access to the post, right?

So I really don't think that's what you mean. You mean that you, specifically, trust your subscribers to comment without being screened (as you've previously mentioned). This will not be the case with all people, and the option should not be changed out from under them.

Because you are proposing giving somebody access to something new: You want to give people someone subscribes to access to comment without their comment being screened by changing the meaning of an option. That's new access, because it didn't work that way before.

So, a new option could be added, because I'm sure there are a bunch of people like you who would enjoy it and function in the same way (after all, you do choose who to subscribe to), but the current option itself cannot be changed--doing so would do damage to the notion that you can subscribe to someone just so you can read their public posts without having to trust them.

[azurelunatic]

*nod* This. It would be nice to be able to edit specific commenting permissions in a more finely grained way -- actually, what would be *really* nice is not only a fine-grained comment permissions thing (though that might get into option overload, idk) -- but the ability to turn on (not on-by-default) analytics that say "You've unscreened this commenter a lot more than anybody else. Are they someone you'd want to add to your [access/unscreened-commenting] list?" Because sometimes it might not occur to me otherwise, if they're someone I see around a lot; the process of making actual friends online is gradual and I may think of someone as a friend without noticing that I've not subscribed or granted access.

[tim]

Yes, another option would be to add a "whitelist" that's a separate concept from your access list *and* subscriber list. The whitelist would contain people who (presumably) aren't on your access list, but whose comments you don't want auto-screened. I'm not sure if that would be option overload or not, but it would work well for me.

[azurelunatic]

My image for it involves a whitelist that could be populated with:
Access list (preset list, not broken down, automatically will include all future additions, possibly mandatory), Subscription list (the people you subscribe to, preset list, not broken down, will automatically include all future additions, not mandatory), possibly all members of the current subscription list individually, and then allow people to add individual others. The list would be able to be sorted by various factors.

[azurelunatic]

From the profile, the terms Dreamwidth uses are:

Subscriptions: the people you have subscribed to
Subscribers: the people who have subscribed to you.

[green_knight]

Other: replacing the current system is a bad idea. I wouldn't mind an additional category of 'people I give access to plus people I subscribe to'.

[turlough]

+1

[marahmarie]

+1

I personally love the suggestion as-is (but want it as an additional option, not as a replacement option) because it screens out Dreamwidth as a whole (say I were to write a post about, I dunno, Denise? and it was quite an edgy little flame and so within hours 300k DW users hit me all at once to say so, quite angrily - well, with Tim's idea, I could just poof! make ya'll go away all at once - before you even get the chance to comment, if I like - while preserving unscreened commenting for those who've been around my DW for a while who I know will take it with a grain of salt because they know that hey, every once in a while, this gal flames somebody, and it just happened to be D's turn - again).

We need this new option. Seriously. Because if 300k of you ever do come after me all at once, without this option, I'm going to need to either 1) screen everybody, or else 2) delete or friends-lock my entire DW to make it stop.

(I currently screen all comments from everyone, btw, but I would love an additional option like this that would let me stop doing that - if it were my choice, I would only screen anons and the rest of you not already on one of my lists).

[tamouse]

I tagged this as "Shouldn't be implemented" because I see this as somehow creating a conceptual link between the concept of Access and the concept of Subscribing, where there should not be a link, I feel. These are two different conceptual models. People you allow to read your stuff is far different that People whose stuff you want to read. Certainly, both of these groups *may* want to make comments, however, writing onto your journal is what access is all about.

[cesy]

Another option is fine, but I agree with the arguments for not changing the existing option.