flagging/tagging entries as "important"

[ciaan]

Title:
flagging/tagging entries as "important"

Area:
entries, reading page

Summary:
A new kind of categorization metadata: separate from tags, separate from the adult content rating, separate from access filters: rate things on an importance scale when you post. Also be able to filter reading page to show only high-importance items.

Description:
How many times have you seen this on your reading/friends page, or posted something like it yourself?

"I haven't been reading for the past two weeks due to vacation/internet borked/final exams/cat tied me in the basement. Link me to anything really important that you posted!"

Or maybe you haven't been reading for two weeks and skip=5,000 scares you, so you look at some of the most recent entries and leave an inane comment to one agreeing that watermelons are yummy. Then the next day you go back further and notice that person just lost their job or had a parent die and you realize you must look like a jerk for not leaving any sympathy before you yammered on about fruit. Or you only have ten minutes a day to read your whole page.

Well, in some programs (like Microsoft Outlook, which is a tool of the devil but I have to use it at work) things can be marked "high importance." So if people used that on posts that were really major (those "comment if you want to stay friended" posts or announcements of birth/death/marriage/moves/name changes or whatever else they especially wanted people to read), then when you had missed a long period of time you could filter your page to only show high importance posts, and that way you could catch up on what you really needed to know from the past two weeks or whatever easily and then go back and maybe read other stuff later. It could also be helpful when you were short on reading time and wanted to skim.

Could possibly be a binary system, with most posts normal and some marked "important" or could be a multi-level system where posts could be given one to five stars, say, and then you could filter your reading to only five stars, or three and up, or whatever you wanted.

Drawbacks are that obviously some people would never use it on their posts anyway, and some people would mark absolutely everything as super-duper important, but oh well.

Poll #868

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 35

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
13 (37.1%)

Should be implemented with changes.
3 (8.6%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
18 (51.4%)

(Other: please comment)
1 (2.9%)

Comments

[ratcreature]

I can see the use in theory, but in practice I don't think I'd ever use it to label my own stuff, because trying to guess what would be most important for my readers would be anxiety inducing. What I mean is, that I don't really know for what kind of post others are following my journal, and not everybody will have the same reasons.

If someone subscribed to not miss the occasional piece of fanart (though considering how relatively rare that is they might be better off with tracking the tag, but let's say they subscribed as eternal optimist *g*), they might want that flagged as important to make te best use of such a function, but from my perspective as a poster that seems somewhat like annoying advertsing to do that for your creative stuff. OTOH for me personally the news that my pet just died might be important, but I suspect it is fairly irrelevant for most readers, even though they might offer sympathy if they happen to come across it.

[ciaan]

And in that case it would be totally your option to never mark anything, never make use of filtering for such markings, and pretty much forget the feature even exists.

I guess for me it's just pretty easy to know which posts I make are normal, and which small handful are ones I especially want my friends to pay attention to. And I would like an easier way to sort/skim when I'm short on time or when I haven't read in a while.

It's not a suggestion I'm hugely emotionally invested in, but I think it would make some stuff easier for me, and I also don't see it as in any way impinging on people who don't want to use it.