View entryprops for your own journal/administrated community

[azurelunatic]

Title:
View entryprops for your own journal/administrated community

Area:
entries, self-service support

Summary:
Staff and senior support have the at-need ability to view some of the troubleshooting information attached to entries; this information could be useful to the journal owner.

Description:
All entries have under-the-hood information called "entryprops" (short for "entry properties") attached to them. Staff/senior technical support can view these at need.

Usually there's no need to view this information, but sometimes there's a simple question (like: did all my icon information successfully make it over when I imported? Generally the importer gets this right, but it's usually more reassuring to see for yourself) that could be answered. (And doubtlessly if it were readily available, there would be more helpful uses for it floating around.) It also strikes me as information that would be useful to a community administrator, if it's available to journal owners.


How would it be viewable? (For all of the cases below, this would only be for the journal owner/community admin; if someone didn't have permission to see if they would get an error.) I have a few thoughts.

1) Create a page where you can enter the link to an entry in your own journal (or your community), and the properties are displayed. This is simple and pretty straightforward, does not require monkeying around with any existing pages, but not entirely friendly.

2) Create a URL argument (like the ?view=flat that you can add after the entry in the address bar) to display it on/from the entry. This would be reasonably friendly, but would probably take a lot more developer doing, and you'd have to look up how to do it if you didn't remember and needed to use it. (Depending on what was less of a pain to develop, I would see this as either adding information to the existing display, or going to a new location containing the information and a link back to the regular view of the entry.)

3) Have a little link/toggle near the rest of the entry information (depending on which was less of a pain to develop as described above), labeled "advanced entry information" or similar, to make it discoverable by people who don't already know to look it up.


Questions about the advisability:

1) Is there enough need for this information that someone couldn't just go ask Support? Senior support could tell people better than I could how often they get requests that require entryprops information.

2) Would this answer more questions than it would cause? It would not be fair to Support to release a feature that would cause a deluge of "What's a ____ and why do ____???!?!" questions. If this is implemented, someone grab me and I will write docs.

3) Would any information be revealed that a community administrator shouldn't have?

4) Would any information be revealed that is Dreamwidth-internal and a user shouldn't have? (I doubt it, but I ask for completeness; staff would have to answer this one.)




Development: This sounds like the sort of high-complexity, low-impact project that might sit for 10 years without being claimed.

Poll #12339 View entryprops for your own journal/administrated community

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 38

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
8 (21.1%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
1 (2.6%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
0 (0.0%)

(I have no opinion)
29 (76.3%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[alexbayleaf]

Actually, I suspect this is extremely low-complexity! All the info is right there in the database, and just needs to be displayed in a basic form. I think you're probably right about "low impact" though -- or at least, "low utility", since it might have a large impact on support load if done wrong. Not that that's a vote against it, mind you ;) I'd find it faintly useful/interesting and I suspect quite a few others would too. It's just not something I can see people clamouring for.

[swaldman]

What information is in the entryprops?

[ninetydegrees]

If you have a hack you could play with the /admin interface and see for yourself. :)

To answer part of your question, there's basic data about the entry like user time, server time, security, screening options,... and info about pics, edits, comments, how it was posted and options use when posting such as autoformat disabled I think.

[swaldman]

Heh, true ;-)

Having looked now, I can't see any info that would actually be of use to anybody but support... but possibly there are use cases I haven't thought of. Maybe more useful to community admins?

[pauamma]

Which entryprops (if any) should be visible to the poster in a comm they don't manage?

[dreamatdrew]

This would also be very helpful for those tricksy issues when a support request has been filed and the requester is watching for a response like a hawk but Upper Level support persons are not exactly available to get entryprops.