dw_suggestions | The suggestions post

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The suggestions post

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.

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I'm using Negatives Black, which was the default when I created my account, with minimal adjustment or customization. A few things I notice which I think other people would want too, universally enough for them to be reasonable to add to the default:

- I'd like to be able to go to my own user info page from my journal. There's a nice big icon I can click on to look at all my user pics (which I never want to do, at least not from there), there's my username right under it but that's unclickable, there are icons for subscribing to my updates (which I want to do once and then never again) or sending email to myself, but not for looking at my user info (which I frequently want to do). Similar considerations apply when I visit others' journals who are using this style. It'd be nice to have a "user info" link in the same area of the page. Normally there's a head-and-shoulders info link in front of every use of anyone's username, so it's surprising that there isn't one of those where the username appears on the person's own journal. I plan to put important information for potential readers into my user info page, so I'd like it to be easy for them to find it.

- It would be nice to have a "Previous" link at the bottom of the reading page so that I can keep going when I hit the bottom. At present there is one only at the top, where I have to search for it. I imagine something similar will apply to my journal's own page once I have 20 entries.

- There are date links at the bottom of my reading page (currently "April 1 2 3 4...") but they don't take me to Reading Page entries from those dates; they take me to my own entries from those dates. On the other hand, when I view someone else's journal who happens to be using the same style as me, they take me to that person's entries. This is confusing. I'd suggest not having them on the Reading Page at all. Something similar happens with the links at the top like "Recent entries". Maybe it'd be better to have it say something like "mskala's recent entries", or (better still) omit them from the Reading Page. When I see links for dates or archives or similar attached to a page, I generally expect them to refer to the page I'm looking at instead of some user account that may be in some way associated with that page.

I'd like to be able to go to my own user info page from my journal.

Negatives has a navigation bar right at the top of the page, which, among other things, links to the userinfo/profile. I see it on your journal - is that not working for you?

"Profile" works; thanks. I didn't notice it probably because after finding links in that bar to be useless so many times, I've already learned to just not see anything that appears there. I still think it'd be good to have the head-and-shoulders icon appear to the left of the username - I expect one anywhere a username appears in that kind of system-generated text, and not having it is a surprise.

I'd like to be able to go to my own user info page from my journal.

There's a link to Profile at the top of the page in the header that will link you to your user info page when you're viewing your journal and to other's user info page when you're viewing their journal.

It would be nice to have a "Previous" link at the bottom of the reading page so that I can keep going when I hit the bottom.

This is currently a bug for Negatives and the styles team,

dw_styles, are aware of.

There are date links at the bottom of my reading page (currently "April 1 2 3 4...") but they don't take me to Reading Page entries from those dates [...] This is confusing. I'd suggest not having them on the Reading Page at all.

The date links are your calendar module, similar to the calendar sidebar on LiveJournal, you can turn it off for your style here or switch it so it'll be on the sidebar and as the table so it will more mimic a typical calendar? I agree with you that maybe there should be an additional option to turn off the calendar module on the reading page?

As for the texts of "Recent Entries" and similar, you'll be able to change them under Text like you could on LiveJournal. The styles team is working on it, I think.

I don't necessarily want the date links to disappear or appear elsewhere on the page - I just don't want them to link to something that feels unrelated to the page on which they appear. Disabling them for the reading page, should that become available, would probably be what I'd choose... but I'm surprised and disappointed if someone thinks the current behaviour should be default.

Ideally, they'd appear and actually work on the reading page - which means linking to a per-day version of the page they appear on.

Having the calendar corresponds with the reading page, having each day links to a page/section where all entries posted on that day from your circle, would take an incredible amount of resources and restyling, I think.

There's a feature for paid/permanent account on LJ that let you view your friendlist at any given date, but I imagine it's a paid feature because of the resources it take.

For regular accounts, there's a limit to the number of entries from your friends/circle that could appear on your friendslist/reading page. I forget the limit, but like, if your friends/circle posted 600 entries in the last 20 days and it's the 25th on the calendar, I don't think you would be able to navigate to the 1st.

Also, the friendslist/reading page is coded so that it displays entries as they are being made, not arranged by the date/time set, if that makes sense. To re-arrange the entries to a date and by time, when most users live on different timezones...

It would be cool to have a paid/premium feature on DW where you could see your circle list on any given dates and to have a circle calendar page, but I don't think it would be feasible to have that option offer to any accounts? Nor exactly what you're asking.

As a sometime programmer, I understand those points, but I'm trying to comment as a user here, not as a programmer... and what the user sees is "this link does something bizarrely different from what I expected it to do when I clicked it." From the designer's point of view, if doing what the user expects is too expensive, then I think the best resolution is that the link shouldn't appear - even if doing something weird and confusing would be cheapest of all.

Oh, I apologize. I think I misread your comment. I thought that you were suggesting for the calendar to lead to Reading Page entries from those dates if you're on the Reading Page instead of having the calendar be disable on Reading Page by default?

Define "should". I think that having the calendar appear, and lead to the reading page entries from the corresponding dates, would be the best thing for users. I recognize that it may be too expensive to actually do that. If it's too expensive and we can't have it, then I think having the calendar not appear on the Reading Page would be preferable to what we have now. I don't think there's any way that what we have now can be called correct or acceptable. I'm describing the relative priority between three options, not just suggesting one.

Ah, gotcha.

Now that you word it that way, that makes sense. It never would have occurred to me that those links might take me to my Reading Page, but I've been largely ignoring LJ's calendar for 6 years now... a newer user isn't going to be as familiar.

And yes, somehow it seems more obtrusive/linked to the Reading Page at the bottom of the screen than it does in the left sidebar. I don't know why.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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