truncated crossposts

[kaigou]

Title:
truncated crossposts

Area:
crossposting

Summary:
Add option to truncate posts when crossposted, so that entire post is not reproduced elsewhere.

Description:
Like many folks, I crosspost so non-DW people can see the entry on their flist, but I don't care for having the entirety of every post kept in multiple places. I'd much rather provide some kind of summary/entry section as teaser, and require that reading the rest means coming back to DW (which is also the only place I have comments turned on, as well).

Perhaps default be the first X number of characters, or stop at the cut (with cut being link to the DW post?). Which gets used would be dependent on which is programmatically easier. ETA: to clarify, this would be optional per post. You could crosspost as normal, with the entire thing going elsewhere, and then on the next post you could opt to truncate. [See comments from some other suggestions on how truncating might work.]

I'd be happy either way, so long as the objective of "only a little posted elsewhere, and must come to main (DW) journal to read the rest" is achieved.

Poll #2525 truncated crossposts

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 75

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
36 (48.0%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
16 (21.3%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
11 (14.7%)

(I have no opinion)
12 (16.0%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[msilverstar]

I think the current system of adding a footer with the link to the original post is enough to take care of this, for a while at least.

[kaigou]

Yes and no. The footer means I don't have to manually enter a link, but it doesn't truncate the posts. It only adds a footer. I still have to go to all xposted posts and edit them manually to remove all but the first paragraph or so of text -- and if I then edit the post later, that manual edit gets overridden, and the xposted post is back to being the entire post again.

[ninetydegrees]

This sounds to me like a feed with the summary option turned on.

[kyrielle]

If all entries are public, it's the same; for cross-posting access-locked posts it would differ, since those aren't included in the feed. But presumably it could use the same function (or similar, depending on how the code is structured) to pick where to truncate.

[kaigou]

I didn't realize it wasn't obvious that the option would be optional per post, so I edited the text to reflect that. There are some posts I don't mind having stored in multiple places, but there are some posts I want to be able to say, "here's a little bit of it, come over to DW to read the rest." So I see it as a cut, where you can turn it on or off.

You can't do that with a feed -- the summary option would apply to every single post, without variation, and that's not what I'm asking for, here.

[ninetydegrees]

Oh ok. Thanks for the clarification. :)

[noracharles]

I like this suggestion, and have long wanted something similar.

Instead of using a specific character limit or the first <cut>, I'd like to have the entry truncated at a specific tag, like <trunc>, which would create an anchor in the dw entry, like <a name="trunc"></a>, and a link to the anchor from the crossposted entry.

[justhuman]

That's what I was thinking as well.

[annotated_em]

+1

[kyrielle]

Okay, that is very very shiny. On the other hand, making people enter a tag to truncate might not be ideal. I wonder whether they could set it to auto-truncate and just insert the anchor there, and then add a truncate tag for users who aren't set to auto-truncate but maybe want to do that with some posts.

[syntheid]

+1

[noracharles]

Good idea. As long as those who want it have the flexibility to truncate or not, and to choose the best spot :-)

[eruthros]

Oooh, cool idea!

[cheyinka]

That would be a nicer way to handle it, I think. It'd be nice if you could preview the truncated version, too, to make sure you weren't going to be bleeding bold text or something over the rest of the page once the crosspost went through.

[noracharles]

Good point.

[zarhooie]

+1

[sofiaviolet]

+1

[twisted_times]

Another +1 to add to this. :)

[stephenie_n_lamaina]

ditto

[matgb]

Wordpress has the [more] tag, which is fairly well understood (it inserts a "read more" link by default that can be changed), I propose using more rather than trunk for interop and usability purposes, but yeah, that would be a rather nice feature.

[cheyinka]

First X characters means HTML tags might be left unclosed (or might be truncated, themselves) and since that could wreck someone's entire friendslist page, that's no good - but truncating at the first cut would work.

[zvi]

I actually think it's a bad idea for DW as a service (great for individual users, bad for the service overall.) A lot (a lot) of bad blood already between us and other services, and truncated "read only at DW" posting is just going to exacerbate an already existing social problem.

If you don't want to store posts on other websites, you can choose not to crosspost on an individual basis, and you can post at the other website to alert them that there's an entry at DW, but I really don't think that we should encourage this behavior by automating it.

[feathertail]

I think that this is a valid concern.

I also think new features need a lot of justification. Where exactly would it appear in the UI? How long would it take for somebody new to grasp it? What use does it have for someone who's not cross-posting to anyplace?

Maybe if you have comments turned off on the remote service, you could flip a switch somewhere in the crossposting section that says that "cut" tags link people back to the DW entry. If I were to implement this, that's how I'd do it. I'm not sure it's a good idea though.

[kerravonsen]

Maybe if you have comments turned off on the remote service, you could flip a switch somewhere in the crossposting section that says that "cut" tags link people back to the DW entry.
I think that's the best way of implementing it.

[coraa]

I have this concern as well.

[kerravonsen]

Hmmm. Do you consider that the option of disabling comments at the other journals and forcing all comments to be only at Dreamwidth is a bad idea for DW as a service too? Because, IMHO, this is just an extension of that idea. In a way, it makes things more convenient for readers, if, for example, the truncation is done at the cut-tag, because instead of clicking once for the cut, and then clicking again in order to see the comments on the post, they only have to do it once, to get to the full entry with all the comments also.

[zvi]

I think that one is a tradeoff, which, on balance, is better for Dreamwidth than not.

One) It's actually a pretty common behavior with RSS feeds, for the feed to show the whole article, but with comments available at the originating website.

Two) I think having a single conversation is a larger benefit for more users than partial posting would be, since there are other methods to achieve partial posting, and it appears that partial posting is an occasional desire, while comment consolidation is something people like to turn on and leave on.

Three) I think that, with LJ-based platforms specifically, there'd be a harm to users and the service, if their friends were following them via RSS feed account at LJ: specifically, on can comment on the RSS entry at the remote LJ platform, but it doesn't trigger any of the usual comment monitoring for the OP, and people really, really, really don't get that.

[kate_nepveu]

Question: What happens when you post something at DW that's too long for LJ?

[sofiaviolet]

It errors. "Failed to crosspost entry to sofiaviolet@LiveJournal: Client error: Post too large."

[kate_nepveu]

Thanks. I'd support an auto-truncate for that (perhaps after the error message, give the person a choice), but not for this.

[kaigou]

Except I wouldn't want -- and am not suggesting -- an auto-truncate in the sense of "no matter what you post". I just would really like the option, per post, that when I say I want to crosspost, that I can click something that says, "send only summary" or "send truncated" or whatever. Some posts I do, I send in full; other posts, I'm thinking, I don't want this stored elsewhere, I'd rather have people come to DW to read than have so many copies of this all over the place. (This especially goes for locked posts on story drafts, as well as for fanfiction, where I don't trust LJ, specifically.)

I suppose if the post were really really long, then truncate automatically in any crosspost, but otherwise, I just think it would be handy if on any single post, I could choose whether or not the entire post gets sent elsewhere.