Your ideas for the 'sticky entry' feature

[yvi]

Title:
Your ideas for the 'sticky entry' feature

Area:
entries

Summary:
I am looking for people's ideas on the not-yet-implemented sticky entry feature.

Description:
This is not a suggestion, but denise said I could use the community for this :)

Lots of people have made the suggestion for backdating entries in communities, but nothing ever happened in that regard. For the past weeks, I have been working on and off on a feature called the sticky entry (I think it's too late to rename it now :)), which will be available for all accounts, personal and communities.

As it is now, the feature has a few basic capabilities: You post or have already posted the entry you want to show up on top of the recent entries pages for the account. You can then, as the journal's owner or a community moderator, designate one entry to be the sticky entry. It will then be loaded on top of the recent entries page, even if you go back in time. This is basically what people know as a 'sticky thread' on forums.

A bit more information: that entry will be style-able independent from entries through CSS, but will just show like a normal entry when you don't have any special CSS defined for it. For now, we don't have options to style it in the 'customize style' options, but we will, at one point :)

Here's where you come into the equation, though. Apart from an icon and a 'pre-subject text' that can be customized it doesn't yet have any great features. Is there anything that you users want to see for this entry? I am drawing a bit of a blank here and would appreciate any input.

[again, a note that while the patch to implement this as I described here exists, it hasn't yet been reviewed and committed, so it could end up a bit different]

Thank you.

Comments

[adalger]

This is hard for me to distinguish from the Custom Text module enough to get excited about it. OTOH, allowing any entry to be flagged "sticky" makes that difference.

Important to me: I assume you've implemented in such a way that it only affects Recent Entries, not other people's Reading pages? I would be very dissatisfied with having to page past 42 pages of sticky entries in people's journals, various communities, etc., before I could even get to my new posts from journals I subscribe to.

[yvi]

his is hard for me to distinguish from the Custom Text module enough to get excited about it.

It's style-independent (custom text has to be entered again when you change styles) and can contain all HTML entries can (though I am not sure how custom text handles that). The first idea was to implement it similar to that module, but because the text would be wiped when you change styles, that idea was abandoned.

I assume you've implemented in such a way that it only affects Recent Entries, not other people's Reading pages?

Of course :)

[cesy]

Isn't custom text going to be made style-independent soon, though?

I thought it was more that you could take an existing entry, complete with formatting, cut-tags, comments, etc. and just move it to the top, like stickying a thread on a forum.

[yvi]

Seems like I forgot quite a few differences, like, you know, being able to comment on it and such things :) Also, I don't particularly like the custom text and never read it when I look at journals.

Also, style=mine won't affect sticky entries.

Actually, now that i think about it there are a lot of differences.

Isn't custom text going to be made style-independent soon, though?

I have no idea :) It's at least supposed to not react to style=mine at one point.

[archangelbeth]

What does not-reacting to style=mine entail? On the one hand, I think I can see why you would want the stickyentry to not get moved around by style=mine, but on the other hand, I'm very control-freaky about being able to see things in, well, readable styles.

I suppose someone with an unreadable stickyentry will get what they deserve -- no readers...

[sofiaviolet]

What I've been assuming that means is that the content of the stickypost won't be affected by style=mine, the way the custom text module (or various other ways of adding sticky text into your journal via layout fuckery) currently is.

Which means we can debate the extent to which the stickypost obeys style=mine when it comes to formatting (for example, I have custom CSS that shows bold text in a different color. I would expect stickypost.html?style=mine to obey the viewer's CSS for bold text, not the OP's).

[yvi]

What I mean witgh that is that style=mind won't make your own sticky entry appear, which is what happens with the custom text right now - you see your own text on someone else's page.

[archangelbeth]

Ah-ha! Thanks.

[adalger]

Now I see the difference. Yes, I like. I, too, though, am drawing a blank on what awesome coolness features it should have. I suspect many people wil be able to point them out when your implementation lacks them. ;)