The suggestions post

[denise]

Soon (for certain values of 'soon'), there will be a "suggestions generator", where you fill out forms and it will post an entry to this community for you, for discussion and the like.

Until then, if you've got something you'd like to suggest for Dreamwidth, you can leave it as a comment here! You can review our development roadmap explanation first, since it includes a lot of our upcoming big projects.

The Suggestions Generator is now live! Please fill out that form instead.

Comments

comment pages, manage circle, search utility set, and profile

[vylit]

Default comment pages! I love that everyone has different styles, but trying to comment in some of them is hell, and while I'm aware that we have the light-style option, there are a couple of reasons why I think it's a problem. (1) Super unattractive. The default comment page on LJ has functionality while still looking like something you don't mind staring at for an hour while reading that EPIC 12 part fic. (2) In the light-style, you lose the link up top that allows you to go to someone else's journal/your subscription list/manage your circle/whatever have you and the page loses functionality. It seems better to leave something like that available to people don't have to maneuver through two or three pages instead of one. Is there any plan to use default comment pages?

Is the green and red on the manage circle page going to stay those colors? It's a little bright, and red/green are two colors that are often affected by colorblindness, which might be an additional consideration.

In the search utility, I think it'd be more useful to have the default be on user and account rather than interest. People are going to be looking up other users and communities that they may occasionally track but not subscribe to more often than they are going to search for people by interest. Particularly when if it's one of their interests, they only have to click on that to pull up a similar interest page. I know this was discussed on DW Discuss, and the memory thing that they brought up was really smart too.

And lastly, is there any way to make it so when people add in other services on their profile -- twitter, delicious and last.fm, for instance -- that it can connect to their user name on the site? I know there's going to be a massive change on the profile page, and that's something I'd really like to see.

[jeeps]

there actually is a default comment page! i just think most people have it set so that these are not disabled on their journals.

and now that i look, i can't find where you would disable it, though i swear to god i checked some relevant ticky boxes the other day (especially since my comment pages are showing the default site scheme).

[zarhooie]

Once the comment threading in gmail is sorted out, can there please please please be a way for all poll response notifications to be threaded into one (one!) email thread for a poll? Getting 73 responses to a poll is awesome. Getting 73 emails telling me about those responses are not.

[cora]

SO TRUE :|

And to tack on/expand on this idea:

For those of us who have conversations through comments, is it possible to get a "don't email me for responses to this comment" option? Simply because carrying on a conversation via comments is awesome, but getting an email saying "so and so replied!" when I'm refreshing the page every minute isn't so awesome.

[arabella]

A few of the things I'm noticing - though it might just be a lack of site knowledge on my part:

- I can't seem to access my profile from the top bar. If I go into my inbox, I have to then navigate back to my DW page to click 'user info'. I love that the bar provides quick access to changing my user pics and my account info, reading my list of friends posts & updating, but it would be nice to have a link to the profile there as well.

- The user info allows for HMTL but some of the table coding I've put in doesn't actually show up. Specifically: font size and background color.

That's it, really. Everything else is working wonderfully for me!

[jeeps]

click on the head next to your username! that will take you to your profile.

Subscription to OpenIDs

[mskala]

At the moment I can "subscribe" to an OpenID user, but this appears to have no actual effect. It seems like it can't do anything meaningful in general, because OpenIDs don't have a stream of postings that could be displayed... however, there is an important special case, which is that many OpenIDs actually correspond to Livejournal accounts, or accounts on other services of this type. In the case of a Livejournal OpenID it happens that the ID points at a URL which is for a Web page whose metadata contains a feed URL. It seems like in such a case it should be possible to pick up the feed URL and syndicate it. That's what subscribing to an OpenID ought to mean.

So, I suggest:

(best) When someone subscribes to an OpenID, check the corresponding URL for a feed link in the meta tags, and if there is one, treat the subscription as a subscription to that feed. If there is no feed, generate some sort of error or warning.

(okay) If subscribing to an OpenID currently does something, then clearly document what it actually does.

(compromise) If subscribing to an OpenID does not actually do anything and can't be extended to do something reasonable, then make it impossible to subscribe to OpenIDs.

Over on the relevant comment thread on my own journal, ai_hua@livejournal suggests that it would be really nice if, in addition, comments made on her syndicated feed could be forwarded to her Livejournal account - but that obviously opens several other cans of worms, and it sounds like it would require Livejournal's cooperation in a significant way.

Re: Subscription to OpenIDs

[mskala]

Further to that: it appears that OpenID users can also grant me access to their journals - except they don't have journals. I got a notification pointing me at a URL for the OpenID's "journal" which was actually an error message page saying "Try such-and-such URL instead." If it's not possible to make this useful, it seems it would be better not to allow it.

Change "Manage Circle" display

[mecurtin]

I just posted about this with a screencap, but here's the text:

When I go to "Manage Circle", I get a screen where the columns of the table with the info ("Gives you access" and "Subscribes to you") are much larger than the columns where I click to make a decision, so they draw the eye. Worse, much worse, is the way they are color-coded: *bright* green and DANGER DANGER red. The first thing that hits the eye when that table comes up is DANGER DANGER red, which we've all been trained to see as the "Must deal with this now!" warning.

So: it makes me anxious, it means I can't look at that list without feeling like the red is signals a PROBLEM I should be SOLVING, because people don't LIKE ME so I should DANCE HARDER. Or something.

I hate this. At the very least the colors need to be different, more neutral and un-emotional. At best I'd like to be able to suppress display of the Gives you access/Subscribes to you columns, so I can ignore them and improve my sanity.

Re: Change "Manage Circle" display

[afuna]

Oh man, yes the green and red. The good news is that it was only ever meant to be temporary, and there is a new version of that page being written right now.

Total overhaul, it is (or shall be) gorgeous.

Raw stats bogus

[mskala]

The "raw" statistics file at http://www.dreamwidth.org/stats/stats.txt seems to contain bogus, or at least far out of date, information. For instance, it lists a total of only 46 accounts.

Re: Raw stats bogus

[chris]

Trying to keep statistics-related suggestions in one thread:

On http://www.dreamwidth.org/stats.bml, please consider the following, motivated by the goal of "open operations":

1) As well as quoting the number of "Total accounts", please also detail the numbers of personal accounts, OpenID accounts, communities, and feeds
2) Please etail how many personal accounts are seed, premium paid, paid and free
3) Explain what "active in some way" actually means :-)

Of the personas, Ivy Inward and Lisa Lurker wouldn't care, Betty Broadcast might be interested in passing and Patty Passionate would love it!

Redirect from coolhunt; this may be a styles issue

[zvi]

Quick reply has a browse button which lets you preview icon selection; ?mode=reply does not have this button, and it should.

[elynross]

I don't know if these have been or will be addressed, although I haven't found mention of them elsewhere.

I would really love to see a full set of "hide" options for each category of access and subscriptions on the profile. Currently you can hide the people who give you access or subscribe to you that you don't give access to/subscribe to, but you can't hide who you give access to, or who you subscribe to, or any of the mutual sets. I'd particularly like to be able to hide all levels of access.

Reason: I'm one who thinks that while splitting up access and subscription is an awesome thing as a user, it may actually cause more hidden drama than the "friends" thing, and being able to see who has given access to someone else and *not* you, etc., will only make that more "traumatic" for some. It seems odd to me that I can hide who hasn't given me access, but I can't hide who I give access *to*.


More trivial:

I also miss having my journal title at the top of my flist be a link to my friends page, as it is on LJ (but perhaps this is style dependent).

wrt the title of your subscription list as it displays at the top of your reading page:

It would be nice if it were on a separate line, not at the end of your journal subtitle. And if possible, it would be nice if neither the subtitle nor the reading list title had a period at the end.

[charmian]

IIRC they're not going to allow you to hide you access list because they think before you comment on the locked post of someone who gives you access, you should be able to have an idea of who can potentially comment (potentially=not sure exactly, because some of the people on the access list may be filtered out).

However, I think this could be partially improved by allowing people to hide their access list from everyone BUT those on their access list, as the above situation only occurs when you have granted someone access. Someone who is not granted access then has no reason to see an access list.

bug report user name=openid users

[zvi]

linking to openid accounts requires discovery of the ext_### account name. More elegant to allow <user name=whateverurltheyuse.tld>

Importing Circles (or flists)

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

Hi guys! OpenID user only so far, but likely to make this my "home from home" once you're fully open. =:o}

I have a long flist on LJ, a significant percentage of whom are likely to wind up over here eventually, but probably not all at once. Rather than having to consult my LJ profile and search DW for each ID manually to see if they've arrived yet, it would be handy to have a tool that reads the list of user IDs from my LJ profile, and searches for each one on DW automatically. The output would be a list the IDs it finds over here, in the form of standard user links, with a mark to show which ones I've already got in my "circle" (nice term that, BTW! =:o} ). From there'd I'd be able to click each of the unmarked links, confirm the account owner was who I thought it was, then add them to my circle (if I want to) and/or grant them reading rights (if I want to).

Would FOAF information be sufficient to implement that, or would it involve the dreaded page scraping?

Re: Importing Circles (or flists)

[cora]

I don't think this will work out. Simply because people on your flist might choose a different username on dreamwidth, or someone else signing up to dreamwidth might inadvertently use one of your friend's username.

To improve this, I think maybe being able to enter in your friend's emails (and doing the same thing you suggested with usernames, only using email addresses instead) might be a better solution.

OpenID access from hover menu

[stellar_dust]

There's currently no link to grant or remove access for an OpenID in the context hover menu. There is a link to subscribe or stop subscribing, though, and it tells me when I *have* granted access to them. Possibly this was meant to be the other way round - link for access, no link for subscribing - but I'd like to at least see the access control links added to the context hover for OpenID accounts.

Re: OpenID access from hover menu

[cesy]

Am I right in thinking that this is now fixed?

OpenID sign in

[silverblade219.livejournal.com]

When you log into OpenID, it takes you to this page (http://www.dreamwidth.org/login.bml) afterward, which now says "Welcome back to Dreamwidth! You're logged in as [info]. Go have fun. Here are some suggestions: View your Reading Page"

It would be easier if redirected to the page I was on. I tend to click sign in on the Reading Page, but sometimes I go to sign in to comment on something and then I have to go back or refined the page that I was on before.

[jeeps]

are there any plans to include a "view the entire thread this comment is a part of" option in comment notification e-mails? it's one of the few good things lj has done recently.

[denise]

Yeah, LJ added that in after we branched our code -- we do want to get that in, just haven't had a chance to.

Redirect from cool hunt, tagging

[zvi]

When posting a new entry, you can type in tags free-form, and it will auto-complete, which is great. Can I also get a link to the list of all my tags, or a drop-down, or something like that? Sometimes my mind just goes blank and I can't actually think of the first character of the tag I want.

&

You know what would be nifty? If, on the post page, the label "Tag" in front of the tag field was a link to that journal/community's tag page. Similar to the "picture" link on comment forms, it would serve to remind you what tags you have already specified (so you don't make a tag for both 'parker/hardison' and 'hardison/parker', for example), and would be /especially/ helpful in fic and other communities where tags are already defined.

Re: Redirect from cool hunt, tagging

[jerico_cacaw]

I actually love what Archive of Our Own has made for the add-tags box (and characters, and pairings, and fandoms). There's not a drop-down menu, but when you start writing, the list of all tags somewhat alpha-related appears, and changes as you keep writing. For example, if in pairings you want to add Wilson/House, this happens:

+ when you have the first three letters (or more, or less -- this is just an example), all pairings with any form of wil will appear;
+ let say you already typed Wilson. the list contains all pairings with a character named wilson, including Greg House/James Wilson (yes, with the bolding)

You can add new entries to the list, but if what you're looking for is already there, then the chance of miss-writing something is much lower.

[jeeps]

something i badly want is the ability to organise icons after they've been uploaded, so that i can group similar icons together. like a drag & drop thing.

[orexisbella.livejournal.com]

That would be brilliant. I get annoyed when looking at my icons page on lj for this very reason.

[cofax7]

I was wondering if y'all would consider making it possible to hide the list of people who a given user has granted access?

I appreciate that I can hide the names of people who have subscribed to my DWJ and/or granted me access. But for myself, the particular level of intimacy between me and my friends is no one's business but me and any given friend, and I'd like to protect that, if possible.

I have no idea whether this would create or reduce interpersonal "circle" drama, but it's something I would appreciate (and probably some other folks too).

[eli]

Yes, please! For the same reason.

[eli]

This is an issue I know LJ was running into, but they found a way to fix it, so I figure I might as well bring it up here now that I've had enough people respond to me to say, "hey, I recognize this" --

When getting comment replies sent to me in Gmail, they all get threaded into one thread, rather than being separated out by the post the comments happens on. (i.e., two comments, on two completely different posts, end up in the same Gmail thread.) It would be truly nifty if that didn't happen.

Gmail threading

[cesy]

I believe this is in the pipeline to be fixed. Lots of people are finding it annoying, including several of the developers ;)

In the meantime, putting subjects on your comments improves the situation slightly.

[nestra]

For the Search box that shows up on the Profile page, it drives me nuts that the default value is Interest. It drove me nuts when LJ changed it, because before that, it had defaulted to Site and User.

This may just be me, but I never search by interest. I always search for a user name. Do you have any idea if I'm just a weird outlier? Is it possible to have the drop-down default to Site and User, or is that a bad idea for some reason?

Thanks!

[sorchasilver.livejournal.com]

It's not just you! I know that this has already been brought up elsewhere (more than once) and passed on for consideration, but I don't know if there are any plans to change it. One suggestion I saw was to make the drop-own menu remember your last selection, which seemed like a good idea.

I end up wasting time searching for usernames in the interests search all the damn time!

[pthalo]

I'd like to see a way to tag posts on your friends page for "I want to deal with this later", something I could click on, possibly viewable only to me, that would remind me (rather than having 1353 browser windows open) that later on, I want to go back and comment, or I want to go and do that meme myself or whatever. This is different from "Track this" because I don't want to be notified of comments on the post and different from memories because it's a temporary thing. Kind of like marking e-mails in your inbox to deal with later.

If the security of the post was edited later so that I couldn't see it, it should silently disappear from my "deal with later" list until the post is re-edited so that i can see it again.

[lanterne_rouee]

that would be so amazingly helpful!

search feeds

[lanterne_rouee]

a way to search feeds would be great. either on this page:

http://www.dreamwidth.org/syn/

(instead of browsing through the most popular and 1,000 most popular lists*)

or as a directory search.

neither the directory search or community search returns feeds, so far. i realize feeds don't have interests listed, so i suppose it means people who know how to design these things would have to do something special to make it happen. (right?)

when searching by 'site and account name' in the regular search bar, the exact name it was given by a user will find a particular feed, but the site url or relevant keywords doesn't. and if you know the exact name of the feed, you don't need to search for it. lol

rock on. you're all doing such a great job with this site!
:)



*also, will we be able to see a complete list of feeds once there are over 1,000?

Re: search feeds

[queenbarwench]

Yes! This would be very helpful.

It would also be good to find a way to weed out duplicates. The last time I looked, there were already four different feeds for I Can Has Cheezburger, and Daily Kitten and xkcd were duplicated too . I expect that happens more frequently in the less-subscribed end of the list. People will get bored of looking and create their own feed, thereby hogging usernames and making it even harder to find the small things at the end of the list.

[cleothemuse]

Not sure if it has been mentioned previously or not, but allow users to have certain notifications emailed to them WITHOUT it first going to their Dreamwidth inbox.

When someone comments on an entry, for example, I just want it emailed to me... I don't want to then have to delete it from my inbox here.

[cesy]

This isn't possible at the moment for technical reasons - the way the entire notification system has been coded means that things have to go through the inbox. There is a plan to add automatic filters so you can send certain inbox messages straight to the trash if you want.

Color selection when subscribing

[elf]

When I subscribe to a journal, I want to set the color codes. I use them to remember where I met someone online, or what kind of posts I expect from them. (Longer rambly stuff about this at my journal, which is not written properly as a bugreport/suggestion.

Right now, the method for selecting colors to attach to the person is annoying to the point of "useless to me;" I don't know what HTML numbers go with the standard LJ color selections, and I don't want to have to memorize a couple-dozen of them.

I can't even find out by going to "Manage circle" and entering them manually; you don't get html for that, you get names. I want the popup colors to match the ones I get to use with "Manage Circle." As it stands, when I subscribe, I have to leave the colors blank, and later go to "Manage Circle," and put their names in the section at the bottom, check whether I've subscribed or accessed them, and fix the colors. Which is a pain.

Re: Color selection when subscribing

[amber]

In the meantime, consider bookmarking a quick table of hexadecimal colour codes - no memorizing needed!

[bessemerprocess]

I've been thinking about the DW-gmail problem. Is there an option that would allow the journal owner to make the default comment title the title of the post instead of blank? It would still be changeable by the poster, but that way, even lazy commenters like me would have a comment title.

[denise]

We may have encouraging developments on the Gmail front. Stay tuned. :)

[stellar_dust]

How about adding LibraryThing to the Other Services list in the profile? :D

[cesy]

There will eventually be the ability to add new services yourself if they're not already there.

Multiple email addresses

[stellar_dust]

It would be nice if I could designate one email address for official communications and comments, and a different one to be listed in my profile. .. Specifically, I want comments sent to my yahoo account, but if someone wants to randomly email me to say hi, I want them to use my gmail.

I'm working around it, but if it's not too difficult to implement, it would be fantastic. :D

Re: Multiple email addresses

[cora]

This. Definitely this.

The only thing I'd like to expand on is maybe having different friends groups see different email accounts?

Specifically, if I add anyone from work on here, I want them to see my "professional" email address, whereas for all my Internet/non-work friends, I'd like to see my default email.