"This post will self-destruct shortly...": automated security changes

[kaberett]

Title:
"This post will self-destruct shortly...": automated security changes

Area:
privacy, filters

Summary:
People commonly make public posts which they do not wish to remain public indefinitely. An additional field at posting ("Change security [...] to [...] when [...] (has/have) elapsed") would remove the need to remember to make the manual change at a later date.

Description:
I repeatedly come across cases where people make a post with the specific intention of subsequently changing its visibility, for example:

(1) person with username A changes it to B. They want to flag this up to their subscribers, without creating a permanent trivially-findable public record. They make a public posting, intending to manually restrict access to said post after a week. Memory proves to be a tricksy beast, however.

(2) person wants their "current" entries to be public - on a rolling basis. That is, they *don't* want their entire journal to be public, but *do* want their initially-set-as-public posts over the last N weeks to be generally visible.

(3) person is making a links round-up (LRU); realises they've left out a link; edits the original post to include it. In order to flag this up to people who've already read the LRU and won't read closely again, they make a follow-up post to appear on people's dwrolls, highlighting that they've added a new link, with the intention of deleting the follow-up post after a few hours (at which point it is obsolete, because people who're only just catching up with their reading lists won't have seen the pre-edit LRU anyway!)


In each of these cases, it would be helpful if there were the option tree at point of posting:

Change security at later date? Y/N
Change security to? [pre-defined set of access filters, etc!]
Change security when? [hours, days, weeks...]

... such that in case:

(1) person, at time of posting, can say "make this post access-locked after a week"
(2) user can set a default behaviour of "increase privacy of all posts to [LEVEL] after a month" (where custom filters, etc obviously don't have their privacy level *reduced*!)
(3) user can make the post automatically set itself private e.g. 6 hours after initially posting


In IRC we briefly discussed the possibility of actual self-destruct - i.e. automatic deletion after a set time frame - but consensus there was that auto-deletion is an undesirable behaviour, because (a) deletion is irreversible, and (b) setting posts to private has the same effect on the reader as deleting them.

In terms of downsides, the only one that springs out at me is that - at least for my level of familiarity with the code-base - this would be an absolute *swine* to implement. However, I am very open to hearing other criticisms :-)

Poll #11815 "This post will self-destruct shortly...": automated security changes

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 65

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
26 (40.0%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
10 (15.4%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
13 (20.0%)

(I have no opinion)
15 (23.1%)

(Other: please comment)
1 (1.5%)

Comments

[axiom_of_stripe]

I'd like to see some automatic indication on the post that its security level has been set to change: maybe a "temporary" indicator next to the current security indicator? Definitely something visible to the author of the post, and I personally would like it showing by default to everyone who can see the post -- thoughts?

[cheyinka]

Yeah, that's a good idea. Where it should go, I don't know - I don't think there's any place in non-custom-themed entries where it says what the security is, though.

[axiom_of_stripe]

I don't think there's any place in non-custom-themed entries where it says what the security is, though.

Most styles I've seen (definitely Transmogrified, which I'm using) have it in the headers next to the date as an icon with mouseover caption, and a few of them have it written out. I think all of the standard ones have it somewhere, don't they? (If not, they should!)

[cheyinka]

I meant "Viewing entries in ?style=site, is there any place on an entry's page that has what the security is?", not "are there styles that don't show it?", but then I looked more closely at a locked entry and spotted the lock icon. So it's not that there isn't a place, it's that I overlooked it (twice)!

Maybe the note could go right under the date? "This entry will stop being public on 2012-10-15" or the like?

[azurelunatic]

If someone is doing this to lock down their life better, I can see a use case where it would not make sense to give any warning it was going to go away, so fewest hostile folks would have the chance to screencap.

I feel strongly that if this exists, the choice to say whether it's in use should fall with the poster.