Dreamwidth Suggestions

Description:
Currently, tag permissions are:

Who may see the tag (determined by security level of the entries to which the tag is attached)
Who may add any existing tag to an entry
Who may remove a tag from an entry & who may create new tags to apply to an entry

Adding, removing, and creating tag permissions can be based on community membership or community adminship, or personal journal general access/access group membership.

This is useful as far as it goes. However, tags as they are actually used have developed some other interesting differences.

In some communities, there are often special tags that are reserved for marking administrative actions. Using dw_suggestions as an example, there are several. http://dw-suggestions.dreamwidth.org/tag/

"admin" and "admin: opinion post" are clearly administrative. All of the "bugzilla:" tags are also administrative, and are used one at a time by denise at various points in the suggestions process for very specific purposes. The rest of the tags are descriptive of the content of the suggestion, and can be usefully applied by any interested layperson with attention to detail.

Other communities do similar things with tags, and make things work by either restricting the application of tags to administrators, or trusting the sensibility and goodwill of the community to not apply tags that are clearly designated as administrative with reckless abandon.

To fit this need roughly and based on the use model I described above, tags could be divided into two baskets, one reserved for admins/journal owners, and one that uses the existing settings. However, that doesn't quite satisfy me.

What if it were possible to:

* Set default permissions for newly created tags (tags that already existed at the time of swapover would go with the current account settings for global tag permissions)
* (unchanged) Set permissions for who may create new tags
* Set permissions for who may apply this particular tag to any entry
* Set permissions for who may remove this particular tag from any entry

It should be possible to modify individual tag permissions either singly or in multiple selected groups, and should be possible to sort the tag listing based on permissions.

I defer to people with better UI experience than I have on how that should be accomplished, because it would add an extra layer of WTFery on top of an already complex interface.

When applying tags to an entry, a user should only have the tags that they are allowed to apply be in a list that can be selected from. This would add possibly significant processing overhead to every load of a tagging page, and could be a reason to restrict some of the fancy stuff to paid accounts/accounts that have under the legal limit of tags. (This would prevent me in particular from using this until I got my tags pared down, which I think is only fair.)

I can see arguments for and against displaying a second list of tags that exist and are visible to the current user, but cannot be applied by them.

For: they exist, it makes sense to show them so they know that the problem is not that the tag does not exist; the refrain of "Mods, can you [tag request]?" is familiar in communities with restricted tagging. Having the list on the page to modify an entry's tags saves a click.
Against: why show you something you can't use? Link the full tag list if need be.

The ability to specifically designate a tag as "can be applied by [more permissive group than community admins]" might also solve the problem where admins create tags but don't attach them to an entry, so the tags remain admin-viewable-only until they're used.

Description:
Currently, subscribing to be notified of new entries in a given community or journal results in a notification that there is a new entry, and a link.

It would be useful to the person getting the notification to include more information about that entry. However, the current lack of information is probably deliberate, because no matter how many things are done to make sure nothing is posted with the wrong security or -- well, any of the other possible scenarios where something that wasn't meant to be shared is shared -- no matter how careful Dreamwidth is to make such situations unlikely, they will still occasionally happen.

To further decrease the chances that someone who's not meant to see the entry will be notified that it exists, I propose to delay the sending of most new-entry notifications for about 5 minutes (the same delay before new entries appear on the Latest Things page), which gives time for someone posting an entry to notice and edit before a notification is sent. (People with very slow internet connections or who have been pulled away from the internet would still have a higher chance of something slipping through.)

In exchange for the delay, send the title of the entry along with the emailed notification, and perhaps the tags.

For community administrators with subscriptions to new entries in their own communities, would it be acceptable to send a notification immediately, and with title and tags?


(This suggestion brought to you by Azz's automatic paranoia that something horrible is happening when there is a new entry in dw_antispam while out-and-about with mobile email but crappy internet from the smartphone.)