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

[coffeeandink]

I'd like to be able to ban livejournal users, whether or not they've created an OpenID login yet. It would also be nice to be able to ban by IP address.

[beable]

Banning by IP address - I can see this solving temporary problems (e.g. spammers) but in the long run does it work for keeping someone out of your journal? People can change IP addresses pretty easily - quite apart from things like home connections often changing IP addresses periodically (my ADSL does almost every week it seems) than between home, work, and the anonymity of cafes/hotspots/etc I don't think you have a sure way of keeping a specific person out while maintaining a public journal.

[elf]

If they've made comments in an imported journal, they'll have an OpenID. (I don't, however, know of any way of *finding* those comments, in order to navigate to their profile page and finding their DW usernumber thing. And ability to preemtively ban would be a good thing.)

[mskala]

Strongly against ban-by-IP. It's much too easy for someone banned to get a new IP address, and for someone else to accidentally get a banned person's old IP address.

[gypsy]

This is true, however, I do have a suggestion that is somewhat related... bear with me.

On LJ, if you make comments in various places on the site (friend's lists, communities, etc.) and you change your username (which I presume will be possible here as well) all those comments will show the new username. In the event that you have someone who is an unwelcomed visitor to your journal or are being harassed and you try to change your name to avoid further conflict, they can simply find you via comments.

It is true, of course, that you can just create a new journal, but many times people do not wish to do this, nor do they want to lock all their entries. It would be great if you could choose when changing your name whether you want all comments across the site to reflect the new name or not. Or - another possibility - would be a "delete all comments" feature which allows a user to delete all the comments they've made on the site, all at once. Doing so before changing their name would prevent people from being able to connect the two via those comments. Keeping in mind that I know absolutely nothing about code, so my suggestions may be a lot of work or not even possible.

[amber]

It would be great if you could choose when changing your name whether you want all comments across the site to reflect the new name or not.

Isn't this already possible? I thought if you chose not to link your new names together, your old name would appear in comments with a strikethrough instead of automatically changing to your new name.

[girlfight]

Nope, all the disconnect does it make it so when people visit your old username they see a "deleted" page. All your old comments will display your new username.

[sophie]

I just came across this comment, and even though it's old, I want to explain what's going on here, because it's a little confusing.

In the Dreamwidth (and LiveJournal) database, the primary method of referring to a user is via their user ID, which you can see on your profile. (For example, my user ID is #324.) The actual username, while it must be unique, isn't used to refer to people normally. Thus, this comment I'm making right now will be stored in the database as being made by user #324, not user "sophie". Thus, if I were to rename, the name attached to this comment will change to reflect the new name, regardless of what options are selected.

However, the same isn't true when you do a <user name="sophie"> tag. Here, users are referred to by name, rather than by number. That means that if I were to rename from "sophie" to some other name, then what would happen to <user name="sophie"> tags would depend on whether I asked for a redirect or not. If I didn't, they would be displayed with a strikethrough. Otherwise, it'll be displayed as (and will link to) the new name instead of the old one.

Does that make sense?

[amber]

That makes perfect sense, thankyou so much for taking the time to type out an explanation!

[sophie]

No problem! I'm glad I could help.

One side-effect of this, btw, is that if you didn't ask for a redirect and the old name gets purged, and then someone completely different takes that name by renaming their journal to it, the user tag you made will point to that journal, because it's the same name as the one you linked to before, even though it's somebody completely different.

That'd be fairly rare, though, I think.

[amber]

That happened to me on LJ, actually. I ended up letting the new owner know that hey, we're running in the same online social circles so don't be too weirded out if people get us confused.