Importing to a community

[eosrose]

Title:
Importing to a community

Area:
importer, communities

Summary:
In many cases individuals create personal communities closed to posting from visitors in order to house their creative works (or for similar reasons). These individuals should also be able to import their works.

Description:
The idea of importing whole communities with open membership sounds quite daunting for the very reasons mentioned in the FAQ--the admin does not always own the content of that community. And, unfortunately, I can't see how DW could possibly code things in such a way as to allow communities with posting access limited solely to the owner/admin to be an exception to the general rule at this time. So while I look forward to the day when communities can be imported by admins in the same way as personal journals, that is not what I am trying to propose here.

What interests me is the potential for an admin to import content from a personal journal hosted on another LJ-based service (or even from one hosted on DW). This, I think, would be most useful after the suggestion that content be imported according to tag be put into place, though I can see a potential for usefulness before that, too.

There is potential for abuse here, make no mistake, but admins always have the power to cause trouble when it comes to the communities they control.

The goal of this suggestion is to make life easier for people who want to start keep personal communities, but haven't yet. This particular feature probably wouldn't help those who already have personal communities and it wouldn't help maintainers of open communities.

An alternative might be to allow personal journals on DW to be converted to communities without deleting entries. Once the journal becomes a community, importing no longer becomes possible, which might help with some of the potential for abuse. (Though this idea wouldn't do me much good, since I already created my community and I think reverse conversion is impossible for good reason. ;_;)

Poll #3688 Importing to a community

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 32

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
17 (53.1%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
1 (3.1%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
1 (3.1%)

(I have no opinion)
13 (40.6%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[matgb]

I like the idea of converting journals into comms.

I also like the idea of importing one member only comms into either comms or journals here (it'd be great to have the archive of miss_s_b's theyorkshergob imported directly into her journal here as she's effectively merged her blogging back into one place, for example.

But not sure or certain about taking froma journal here into a community here, I'd wonder why you want to do it. Having said that, flexibility about what you do with your own content is good, could definitely do that sort of thing on wordpress blogs, so why not here?

[msilverstar]

Importing from limited-posting LJ comms sounds pretty good to me.

[piscinarii]

I like this idea a lot.

[zeborah]

Just to toss out an idea expanding on this - and I don't know if it's been discussed before, or whether there are other issues with it - but: What if anyone could say "Please import all my posts from [eg LJ community X] to [DW community Y]"? [ETA: Assuming they have posting access to that DW community, of course.]

There might still be issues of ownership of the comments on those posts, but would this be any different from ownership of comments on personal journals? If so, perhaps they could be left unimported, and a link to the original discussion included?

[eosrose]

If it would be possible to be that specific, that would be wonderful! As a non-coder, it's always hard to guess what's impossible and what's not. Would this be a totally different suggestion though? Maybe you should try submitting it.

[sheelal]

I definitely know our group would love it if we could import our old entries from fratrandas to flatlanders. It's a limited access posting community where only system members can post. A lot of plural groups have such limited communities on LJ and LJ clones, because posting to a community makes it easier for friends to follow up on life without having to follow a half dozen journals at the same time. (Also, on sites with limited icons, having several accounts instead of one group account allowed for enough icon signatures for everybody.)

[stephenie_n_lamaina]

I know the reasons given for it not being proper to be able to import communities but the same argument could be used for the comments that get imported when importing a personal journal.

[krissasaur]

i want this. i have a comm with a close friend and... yea its over on lj T_T