Communities: option to disable the reading page

[ninetydegrees]

Title:
Communities: option to disable the reading page

Area:
communities

Summary:
On LJ, you can easily empty communities' members pages so that even people using ?style=mine will see them empty. On Dreamwidth you can't. I'd like to be able to disable communities' reading pages entirely.

Description:
I don't like having my posts on the reading pages of communities I admin and where I'm the only allowed poster because they're completely irrelevant.

ETA: I also don't want to have to care about the content of the reading page of the communities I maintain. My community may be safe for work and minors - and virus-free, blinking-free,... - but the reading page may not and yet it's been made part of the journal. And I won't police members' personal posts.

Poll #1679 Communities: option to disable the reading page

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 39

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
15 (38.5%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
2 (5.1%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
11 (28.2%)

(I have no opinion)
11 (28.2%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[andrewducker]

I can't see what harm it causes for it to be there.

[matgb]

Playing advocate, I don't care one way or t'other.

Some firms, especially in the US, will block an entire domain if there's any incidence of bad language on any page--I've had problems with sites I admined in the past being blocked for daft reasons.

If you're running an explicitly 'clean' comm, with no adult content, swearing, etc, then find that it's blocked by your work filter, sometimes permanently, because one member swore in a personal post that showed on the reading page, that'd be annoying.

Actually, I think I've just talked myself into agreeing with this--I can't see me ever using the function, but for as long as worksafe filters exist, this sort of thing might be useful.

[yvi]

I do think it shouldn't be called "Read" by default, but I guess I also don't see why public posts would need to be hidden from a community reading page?

[charmian]

I can't really understand why this is necessary/helpful. I think people find reading pages on communities helpful, which is why IIRC, although originally they were not enabled on DW, the feature was deliberately put in by the developers. Sometimes I read the member posts on communities in order to see if there is anyone posting on their own journals on a subject related to the comm.

Also, out of curiosity, I didn't know it was possible to entirely hide the members page on an LJ comm. How is this done?

[yvi]

You can at least artificially make it empty by setting up an empty "Default View" subscription filters for the community, which then gets to be the the one that will show to everyone trying to view the friends page.

[ninetydegrees]

I have closed communities where I'm the only poster - I wouldn't need to have these in the first place if one could have dependent personal accounts but that's not implemented yet. My personal posts are completely irrelevant to these communities.

I also don't want to have to care about the content of the reading page of the communities I maintain. My community may be safe for work and minors (and virus-free!) but the reading page may not and yet it's part of the journal. And I won't police members' personal posts.

On LJ you can create groups/filters for communities. If you create a group called 'Default View' and leave it empty, the community members page will be empty. The ability to create groups for communities is also useful to manage tagging permissions (it's a compromise between 'admin only' and 'any member').

[charmian]

Thanks. The part about how the reading page may be NSFW or unsuitable for minors makes your reasoning much clearer.

Until they decide whether they will adopt this suggestion or not, though, could one stop-gap solution be removing the link to "members"(link to the reading page) from the community page? Although it still could be accessed via the profile or by typing it in, that makes it much easier for people to not stumble onto it.

[ninetydegrees]

What you suggest is useful and I actually did that but, in addition to the problems you mention, this doesn't hide the links when using ?style=mine and some layouts have such styling that you can see something is missing. But yeah, it's better than nothing. :)

[aveleh]

I think it would be confusing for it to sometimes exist and sometimes not (although I guess the network page isn't confusing?) - but I'd like to see this at least minimally possible with a Default View.

[triadruid]

Keeping in mind that there's a workaround currently, this seems like a reasonable option for communities. I definitely want the default to stay the way it is, though - I like reading who is in the same communities as me, sometimes, and it helps me find new journals.