Livejournal Fantasies

[pauraque_bk]

bowdlerized reminded me that I had this lying around. It's just a list of things that LJ would do in my ideal world, regardless of whether they're technologically or logistically possible. I'm not taking the piss, just daydreaming.


In my fantasy world of infinite LJ delights:

- Fpages and lastn pages update automatically without the user refreshing.

- There is a post classification system which your friends-of can use to only see certain kinds of posts on their fpage by default. For example, your mundane friends can choose not to subject themselves to your peculiar fan fiction on a daily basis.

- There is a function to find out how many people actually read a particular entry all the way through, regardless of whether they commented.

- When you see a filtered post, you can find out who else is on the filter.

- You know when someone has filtered you off their fpage entirely.

- It's easy to set non-overlapping reading filters.

- There is an option to merge your friended users, watched comms, and feeds in your userinfo.

- http://www.livejournal.com/users/user/ocomms/ : Shows the entries of all comms of which you are a member, but are not watching.

- http://www.livejournal.com/users/user/afo/ : Shows the entries of Also Friends-Of (people who friend you but you don't friend them). Like friendsfriends, but less frightening.

- There is a plain list of all functions and where to find them. You don't have to ask another user to figure out what friendsfriends is.

- There is a search function that actually works. You can choose to search a particular LJ, or all LJs, or just your flist. Or someone else's flist. Or everything but your flist. Or...

- The month view shows the first lines of posts with no subject.

- Events automatically end with a set of formatting close-tags.

- All the sites I'm interested in have working LJ feeds.



Feel free to add on your own unreasonable LJ functionality wishes.

Comments

[angelsmum.livejournal.com]

Heya, just flicking through my friendsfriends page. My wish would be that you could find an entry through the comment you left on it. =>

[neotoma.livejournal.com]

A search function that really works would be great.

Maybe a graphic to show you the interconnectedness of your friends list, friends-of and friends-friends. That way you might find interesting ljs you've overlooked?

[muridae-x.livejournal.com]

Okay, here are mine:

- a "new!" flag against all posts that you haven't read yet, plus any that have had comments added since you last read them.

- an option to sort posts by when the last comment was posted rather than when the post itself was written. That'd float all the updated ones to the top, so that you wouldn't have to scroll back ten pages on your friends view to spot them all.

- XColibur being fixed to work for all browsers again. Or failing that, all the same menu entries on the Dystopia view so that you can find all the same functions without having to bookmark the ones that aren't easy to get to.

- the ability to use more than five keywords for a memory

- easy ways to be logged in as more than one journal at once in the same browser, while keeping them all straight and never ever misposting in the wrong one.

(I think that last one might be the tallest order. :-) And I am very happy with the LiveJournal I've got - especially now that performance seems to be better again - but those nice to haves are always something to wish for in a more perfect world.)

Oh, and I definitely want that sooper search facility you mentioned. :-)

[sophia-helix.livejournal.com]

Ooo, I like your fpage ideas -- very message board-like, in the best of ways. Treating posts like the discussion topics they really are, instead of personal journal entries, would be lovely.

But I have to wonder -- how much of our wishful thinking stems from the fact that this site is designed for personal journal users, and has kind of been hacked over by the fandom set? I often think I'd like to know what Brad et al.'s thoughts are on *that*.

.m

[muridae-x.livejournal.com]

Yes, you're right about the message board way of thinking. That's exactly where I'm coming from. I cut my fandom teeth on threaded message boards like HyperNews and WebBBS, and still vastly prefer them to the guestbook-style boards that prevail nowadays. The reasons why they've taken over are fairly obvious: they look pretty, and they don't hammer the webservers so hard, but the downside is that you can't really hold a proper conversation.

I think it's the fact that LiveJournal offers the threaded replies to posts that has led to fandom adopting it so wholeheartedly, because it is so conversation friendly as a result. But you're right; I'm sure that wasn't part of the original concept at all. It's just a nifty feature that has been seized upon and adapted to users' own nefarious purposes. :-)

[isiscolo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I come from Usenet, so what I'd like to see is the lj equivalent of a killfile - it would allow you to specify users who annoy you so much that not only do you not read their ljs, but you don't see their comments in ljs you do read.

In addition to sorting by time of last comment - oh, yes!

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

Oh, how i'd like to know who filters me out completely :-) b/c i'd drop them in a heartbeat...i have so many people friended only so they can read me, b/c they asked yet i read my entire flist unfiltered, so i get all their stuff...

my big (and i actually don't think unreasonable) lj wish is to have memory subcategories. i wish the entire memory function were more userfriendly, but the biggie for me right no is hat i'm stuck with 35 large categories or end up having to go through way too many entries in any particular one.

love the ranting :-)

[bethbethbeth.livejournal.com]

::raises hand to vote with cathexys on the filtering issue because I also read my LJ unfiltered and I *know* that not everyone I have friended is reading mine:::

Apart from that, you've listed almost all my unreaasonable wishes, except I'd like to be able to put, say, five interests into a search function and see which users pop up as sharing all those specific interests.

[sophia-helix.livejournal.com]

It's a rotten problem, but it could be solved pretty easily, I think -- simply break the "friends" concept into "has access to posts" and "people I'm reading." Since the two categories are, obviously, mutually exclusive sometimes.

But weren't they briefly talking about doing that, and everybody freaked because they thought it would be insulting to see who someone's "real" friends were? Or maybe I'm thinking of another proposed option that got shot down...

.m

[isiscolo.livejournal.com]

Well, I suppose you could just make a post saying that you're cleaning up your friendslist and asking people if they want to keep reading your stuff to please comment - maybe even making a list of specific names (the ones you have on list because you think they want to read you, not because you find them so fascinating that you read them). And then do it again, just in case you have some sporadics. And then drop them, with a public post saying "if you were dropped and want to read this, please comment". Or something.

I have to say, Eo, that although I'd like to know who else can read the filtered post I'm reading, I would NOT LIKE IT if people could find that out about MY filtered posts. Not that I make many.

And a big "word" on the memories thing. What I'd like would be a way that you could use multiple selection terms like an AND search: select memories that are listed under both "drabble" and "humor", for example.

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

well, the reason why it's nice to know who's in someone else's filter is that you can be open yourself...wasn't that you who accidentally gor filtered in the depression and academia discussion we had a while back on spare_change's lj? it's just nice to know who else is reading before you share too much in someone else's post.

i only have two filters, a personal and a very personal (and probably should at some point just make a if you can read this post with everyone else shown...as our host so beautifully did :-)

[isiscolo.livejournal.com]

Ah, I can understand that.

The caps were not intended to show strong reaction, just contrast. My reasoning was that my "personal" filter is basically "people who I feel particularly close to and who know my real name" and for some reason that seems to me (if I were ON someone else's filter for that reason) as sort of a bragging-rights thing, that I wouldn't want my flist to be able to compare and contrast, nyah nyah, I'M on this filter but THIS PERSON isn't. But maybe that's overly egoistic and cynical :-)

[pauraque]

I would NOT LIKE IT if people could find that out about MY filtered posts

Why the strong reaction? I'm trying to think of a situation where it would cause a problem, and I can't. One can already glean some info about who's on a filter, based on who comments -- what's the dif?

[dancing-moon.livejournal.com]

That old icons stay on the posts they belong too, even if you can't use them for new posts...

[gmth.livejournal.com]

I'd love it if you could "subscribe" to posts in other people's LJs that you're interested in, so you get an email notification whenever anyone posts an unscreened comment in it. That way, you wouldn't have to remember to keep checking back on that post to see how the discussion is shaping up.

[belleweather.livejournal.com]

Do you have any major moral objection to my pointing a friend who works for LJ to this entry? We've been having on and off chats about various wishlist features and I think he'd be interested, although I don't know that he could or would do anything about it...

[pauraque]

Go ahead. At least a few of the suggestions could realistically be implemented, surely.

[nattish.livejournal.com]

I'd love to have a list of all my past comments (or, at least, my most recent comments). I've been looking for one I wrote about my view on Snape's personality for days. Might even be nice to be able to do a search on (anyone's) comments.

[triestine.livejournal.com]

There is a post classification system which your friends-of can use [...] your mundane friends can choose not to subject themselves to your peculiar fan fiction on a daily basis.

This is my only wish - well, that and a functioning search algorythm - but it's one I'd pay for in gold. Has anyone in lj-development addressed it?

[pauraque]

I've seen it addressed in lj_dev, but as far as I know, it's on the back-burner.