![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
azurelunatic) wrote in ![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png){kind=small}
dw_suggestions2013-03-29 08:53 pm
Allow paid communities' reading pages to load by date
Title:
Allow paid communities' reading pages to load by date
Area:
paid features, communities, reading page
Summary:
Loading reading pages by date is a paid feature. Some communities have paid accounts. This is not one of the paid features that extends to communities. Could it be done without killing the site?
Description:
There's a paid feature where you can add /?date=2012-12-12 (for example) to the end of your reading page, and you'll see your reading page as it would have been on that date (had your circle been in the state then that it is now).
This works on your own reading page, but apparently not the reading pages of paid communities. Was this an oversight or a deliberate choice?
Why this would be useful:
Communities' reading pages are usually not particularly useful on a regular basis -- they collect the public entries of the community's members. If you want to read someone regularly, usually you add them to your own reading page or put them in your RSS reader or bookmark them or whatever.
I'm trying to catch up on Alternity this weekend. (Alternity is a journal-based roleplaying game. Most of the character journals are members of the community, and only character journals are members of the community.) It would be really convenient if I could just find the start date and progress through the archives day by day (possibly after throwing a paid account at the community).
Limitations:
It might be a good idea to not have the whole site suddenly hitting a community's reading page for whatever reason.
* Limiting who can do this to community admins would parallel the individual feature, but wouldn't necessarily be useful to the community.
* Limiting who can do this to community members would make sense in general, but wouldn't work for this specific application.
* Limiting who can do this to community subscribers would discourage the casual bot from cruising through and hitting the site with all the hammers.
I believe limiting the timespan available to the reading page was originally done (on LJ with the friends page) because of the load it takes to retrieve entries from all the different journals on all their disparate clusters, particularly when the entries are not recent, and therefore haven't been fetched recently, and therefore are not already cached.
An individual's use of the feature is already calculated into the cost of a paid account. If this were available to anyone who wanted to use it with a paid community, there would be no data on how much it would get pounded if it is used. On the other hand, there are paid communities that would never use it. Another way of paying for the load, if the community's own paid account is not sufficient, would be to require that both the community and the reader have paid accounts in order to fetch this.
Would this be a privacy problem?
It would only contain public information, and community reading pages are already available for two weeks from the current date, for all communities (regardless of their membership restrictions).
It would present the public entries it in a context that would take a bit of doing to get otherwise. Someone could get the same information by adding all the members to their own reading list (in a custom reading group), and getting a paid account, or they could visit all the members' journals from that day.
This suggestion:
Should be implemented as-is.
24 (54.5%)
Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
0 (0.0%)
Shouldn't be implemented.
0 (0.0%)
(I have no opinion)
20 (45.5%)
(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)
no subject
no subject
no subject
uh. NOT THAT I AM GLUED TO REFRESHING THAT TEN TIMES AN HOUR OR ANYTHING
no subject
http://alt-fen.dreamwidth.org/2008/09/08/ is the very first one: the links will take you to LiveJournal for the first year, because it's a manual summary. But when I read avidly in the backlog, I step through from there.
no subject
no subject
(Yes, being lazy, sure I could look this up. Sorry!)
no subject
no subject
AIUI your suggestion is that *anybody* should be able to do this with the reading pages of paid communities. Is that right?
I don't really have an opinion on that (initial thought: nice to have, but I imagine an expensive feature), but just wanted to be clear about the suggestion for people of little brain like me :-)
no subject
And yes, basically anybody.
no subject
That's assuming it's not a horrible drain on the servers. If it's a feature offered for those who really really want it, and the hope is that most people won't use it, a different approach would be in order.
(I had to run off and check. I can't go earlier than /?date=2009-03-08. My account was created on Apr 11, 2009, so that's not the limit. It won't do imported/backdated entries before that. Huh.)
no subject
no subject
we were definitely in closed beta by 2009-03-08.
no subject
no subject
no subject