Update, 1 September 2010

[fu]

Hi Dreamwidth!

I've been stuck with a craving for Lucky Charms (they're grrrreat! And are for kids, silly rabbit), so I've been having that for breakfast this entire week. Also had it for lunch this one time a cat leaped up onto the dining table and ate my lunch for me. Hey, at least the cat didn't get my cereal.

Anyway let me just hand off my cereal bowl and we can start with the update.

A Warm Welcome

We've noticed a lot of new members this week! Welcome to those of you who are coming from LiveJournal -- you might want to check out the Guide to Dreamwidth for LiveJournal Users.

Last Week's Progress

This week's code tour was done by the ever awesome cesy.

That brings us to exactly 2002 bugs which have been resolved fixed, and almost 2300 bugs that have been resolved in some way. This week also brought us another milestone: I filed our 3000th bug!

Since our bug list contains planned features and code cleanup as well as actual bugs, I'm really proud of this milestone.

This Week's Request for Feedback

We have another version of the update Create Entry page up for feedback.

And first of all thank you to everyone who left feedback for the last version! We weren't able to respond to everyone individually, but we read all your comments and tried to take all of them into account while working on this latest version.

The short list of changes is:

• less options on page startup


• ability to customize the page so it fits your posting habits


• full list of tags


• editable individual tags


• fix for the red flash issue


• tweaks for older browsers, including better support for resizing


• various appearance and behavior tweaks

Play around with it a bit :)


We built in drag and drop functionality for mouse users. We are aware that this only works for mouse users, and we'll be working on ways to have something that will work for everyone, not just mouse users.

We'll also start integrating the mockup into the backend soon, which means that the next time we do this, the mockup should respect your site scheme and use your icons/tags/etc (it still won't remember your settings, though, and it won't work to actually post).

Communities that Link to Other Communities that Link to Other Communities

This week's theme for community plugs is communities that link to other communities to get you started on finding and making those communities that you're interested in:

• dw_community_promo - the official community promotion community


• community_promo - an unofficial community promotion community


• create_my_comm - a community for community ideas, in case the community you want doesn't exist yet

And finally, some links that don't fit into the theme, because I've said "community" so much that it doesn't look like a real word anymore:

• getting_started - for any questions you may have about getting started here on Dreamwidth


• interests search, to search for people and comms which share your interests


• site search, to search by keyword for posts about topics you're interested in


• the latest entries page, to see the latest public entries posted to Dreamwidth. Also possible to see the latest public entries with a specific tag
  

Equally Warm Goodbye

And that's it for this week. Rest of this month is denise's as per usual. As always, if you're having problems with Dreamwidth, Support can help you; for notices of site problems and downtime, check the Twitter status page; if you've got an idea to make the site better, you can make a suggestion.

See you again next week!

Comments

[ekmisao]

This is why people are migrating to your place: http://news.livejournal.com/129190.html

we all beg you not to make the same mistake.

[denise]

Fear not. We do hope to add Facebook and Twitter crossposting someday, along with Wordpress, Tumblr, Movable Type/TypePad, etc, etc, but it will have to be set up by the end-user, and if we ever allow the crossposting of comments (which I sincerely doubt we will), it will only be available on locked entries if the comment poster is the same as the entry poster. (So, nobody will be able to crosspost comments from your locked entries.)

[ekmisao]

Thank you.

We'd like to keep that assurance that ranting about the world at large is restricted to people online who we actually want to see that ranting. Often the people we rant to are NOT the people we brush elbows with everyday, the people we are often obliged to add to Facebook for good relations's sake. This is especially true about our geekier or weirder interests, that would raise flak if known by older relatives or employers.

[denise]

Sorry, sophie let me know that my original comment was a little unclear: I should say, if we do allow crossposting of comments, it will be only available on public entries or when you comment on your own locked entries, not somebody else's. (I think that's a lot easier than people having to go turn on/off the ability for others to crosspost comments on their locked entries!)

Your privacy is absolutely one of our Guiding Principles, and since I've been working in social media since before social media was called social media, I've got a really strong grasp of what 'privacy' entails, especially in the use case of those who use DW most frequently! Besides that, I've got a lot of people (starting with mark and fu and going allllll the way on down) who'd come find me with the Mallet of Loving Correction (+5) if I made bad decisions about this. *G* We absolutely believe it's possible to merge interoperability and privacy, as long as we put the choices in your hands, and that's not going to change.

(We also are beholden to nobody but you guys. Paid account subscriptions are the only way we make money, so there is zero economic incentive for us to piss y'all off!)

[ily]

LJ should have thought this out like you have. I'm glad to have my account(s) here. :)

[denise]

And I am really glad that you have your account(s) here, too! Seriously, we couldn't do this without y'all -- there'd be no point in doing all this work if nobody were using the site. I like to call DW "an experiment in radical business transparency", and so far, it's been working really well :)

[blackmare]

If you do this, I would like a means to make sure that Twitter and especially Facebook cannot touch my journal in any way, shape, or form, no matter who comments on my journal or where I choose to comment.

I don't ever want Facebook to know my journal exists, period.

(Editing to add that I don't mean to be belligerent; I'm just freaked out by what has happened at LJ, which was home for something like five years. And I upgraded my DW account to paid today).

Question for you! One of the main things that's kept me from making DW my real online home is that I am an artist and I post a lot of images. Currently, that's very easy to do on LJ, but here, not so much. I've heard this is being worked on, and I am wondering what the status is.

Hopefully the influx of money from fleeing LJers will help fund that and many other fine projects here at DW.

[denise]

mark has posting images by emailing them to DW nearly finished (he just needs to finish up the admin pages for managing your photos once they're posted). After that, it'll be pretty easy to add in-browser upload, once all the backend is done!

In the meantime, though, I use Flickr -- they're pretty easy to manage things with.

[spes_unica]

Thank you for that promise.
Yrs truly,
migrating a year earlier than she had planned because of one too many LJ f***-ups.

[denise]

Welcome to DW. I hope you enjoy it here :)

[silkmoth101]

Thank you for addressing this. :D I hope IF you add FB and Twitter and cross-posting, you will also explain for dummies like me how to not do it with my account.
Btw, I'm here for awhile, and now I guess I will really stay. *g* I think my money will be spend here for a better reason (Meaning: As soon as I have money on my bank, you will get it, lol).
Oh and... if you could find a way for comms to import their journals, I'm sure every fandom on lj would run over here in no time.

[denise]

Now that OpenID accounts can join/post entries in communities, someone is working on comm import!

[muccamukk]

That's great. I would totally use FB crossposting for my own meatspace journal posts. Save me having to wander over and repost links.

[sophie]

Yeah. I'm not DW staff myself, but trust me, DW staff know *allllll* about this. (I strongly suspect the paragraph about lots of new members this week was probably mostly because, you know, staff here probably don't want to come across like they're slagging LJ off. *grins*)

[ekmisao]

Yeah. They're nice that way, yes? ^^v

[ferrell]

From my understanding, Dreamwidth's import tool already allows people to import their entries from LiveJournal along with all comments posted to those entries, regardless of security level, and against the will of the commenter. Furthermore, I've seen numerous credible reports from people who claim that DreamWidth actively refuses to remove the imported comments upon request. I fail to see how this differs in any meaningful way from the feature recently implemented by LiveJournal. Whether it's listed as such or not, I'd have to consider crossposting other peoples' comments against their will a Guiding Principle of the site given that this feature was one of the primary means of convincing people to use Dreamwidth instead of LiveJournal.

(Disclaimer: OpenID commenting to this post is disabled; I am ferrell.livejournal.com / markf.livejournal.com)

[denise]

It is our belief, and that of our lawyers, that comments to an entry fall under compilation copyright, and thus the compiler (aka the journal owner) has the right to move that compilation to a new location. The original contributor retains the exact same amount of control over their contribution to the compilation, and the contribution is still attributed to the original contributor at the same location.

I see no privacy violation there. You may argue that your copyright has been violated, but there are plenty of other people who will argue that it isn't, and legal precedent goes with our position. Still, people who wish to remove their comments have the same option they did on LJ: to use the recent comments page (which we have improved considerably over LJ's version) to find and delete their comments.

[ferrell]

I'm not making any claim of copyright infringement, and I'm not raising any other legal concern. Some people may equate that to copyright infringement, but I find that highly doubtful unless they can prove their content was generating revunue and the crossposting resulted in a loss in revenue from their content.

I'm simply stating that the import tool here has essentially identical concerns regarding content ownership and privacy that LJ's functionality for crossposting to FaceBook has. I think it's purely an ethical issue, and on this issue, both sites have demonstrated the same ethical approach to the it. The only difference is that commenters to this post seem to be under the impression that you haven't, and are spamming LiveJournal with content indicating that Dreamwidth would never take this approach, which you have.

[yvi]

Still, people who wish to remove their comments have the same option they did on LJ: to use the recent comments page (which we have improved considerably over LJ's version) to find and delete their comments.

Sorry, but until http://bugs.dwscoalition.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1189 finally gets fixed, that's really not much help for this situation- OpenID users currently can't see and deleted more than the last 10 comments on that page.

[daweaver]

It is our belief, and that of our lawyers, that comments to an entry fall under compilation copyright, and thus the compiler (aka the journal owner) has the right to move that compilation to a new location.

I'm sure that Dreamwidth has considered the applicable overseas laws, including the relevant European legislation. The Database Directive (96/9/EC) states that EEA nationals or residents retain database rights, similar to the "compilation copyright" mentioned above. It's entirely fair to argue that an individual's journal can be construed as a database under this meaning, and hence can only be copied with the owner's permission. (It's not guaranteed to win, but the case can be made.)

But I can immediately see a grey area. If an EEA national can reasonably argue that their comments (or contributions to a community) form a searchable collection of independent works, or that their contribution is a significant part of the intellectual creation of the database, they could very resonably argue that they hold a database right sufficient to prevent Dreamwidth from importing their work. It's a high hurdle, but I can see certain circumstances - particularly in communities with only a couple of regular posters - where it would be met.

I'm sure that this won't be met with a finger-in-the-ear response of "Laa laa laa, we've chosen the laws of Maryland, this doesn't affect us", because it does. These rights reside with the European citizen, irrespective of where their database is stored. Enforcement, yes, that's more tricky.

(For the record, my view remains that Dreamwidth is morally wrong to import third-party comments without providing a simple process to ensure they can be removed. Deleting those of the last n comments to be publicly available, by hand, is not sufficient.)

[good_lives]

The author of comments imported to DW from LJ retains control over those comments. The comments are associated with the LJ OpenID of the author, who can log in to that OpenID and delete them if they wish.

If the DW copy is inaccessible to the comment author because of entry security settings, then yes, they're stuck unless the journal owner agrees to delete the comment, but they can encounter the same problem on LJ as well.

[foxfirefey]

I think you're right that Dreamwidth is not as pure as the driven snow when it comes to stepping on toes of people and their content and their wishes. Both Dreamwidth and LiveJournal are dealing with similar conflicting user interests and made compromises, and the devil's in the details.

In LiveJournal's case, the commentator wants to cross post their comment to FaceBook. And it's their comment, so it's their content, so why can't they, right? andy rightly points out that the user could copy paste the comment they're making manually to the other site. However, this can conflict with the wishes of the journal user the comment is being made in--the most notable instance, the one being ballyhoo'd and panicked about, when the post the user is commenting on has been locked. Sure, comments belong to the commentator, but journal owners feel like their journal and the comments in them are part of their space--a feeling strengthened by the many things to control comments to their posts (disable them, screen them, delete them, only allow certain users to comment, etc). Since locking a post is something a user does for content they often don't want publicly disseminated, and they consider the comments to the post as belonging to their "space", so having the ability to automatically cross post those comments elsewhere by clicking a box becomes this great big screaming red flag to them. Sure, people can share comments they make to locked posts, manually, but including an automatic functionality makes the journal user feel like LiveJournal wants people to cross post the comments to locked posts to other people the user may or may not know (which is worse? probably depends on the user), as the whole point of the feature is to promote content to others. Additionally, there is no way to guarantee content someone is claiming to be from a locked post really is unless you can see it for yourself (everything else being fakeable)--an ambiguity removed by LiveJournal's authenticated crossposting to Facebook, since you know that's a comment actually made.

In Dreamwidth's case, a journal owner wants to import their LiveJournal's content to Dreamwidth from LiveJournal. And it's their journal, so why can't they, right? Except commentators may or may not want their comments on a different service--and it's their content. I mean, what if they don't trust the admins of that other site? But then again the journal owner has a vested interest in being able to host their journal where they want, and comments are a part of the journal...It's another clash of user desires. In this instance, though, commetators have already been primed to a number of things being possible when they make a comment. A commentator only has the ability to delete their comment, and edit it if it hasn't been replied to yet; they are used to having far less control. They have no ability to control if a user making a post later makes it, say, public. Or if that user gives access to that post to another user the commentator doesn't like. Additionally, when Dreamwidth imports it doesn't expose the comment to people it hasn't already been exposed to (other than perhaps the site admins, who aren't likely to look anyway)--the same journal user has access to it, and probably some of the same LJ people, and new people they give access to on Dreamwidth (but, the user could have friended new people on LJ, so it's pretty equivalent). The LJ user can go in with OpenID and delete the comments in a suboptimal manner, though, if they feel really strongly about it like some people do.

In *both* LJ and DW's cases, the people in question both have legitimate desires that are difficult to simultaneously meet. The main difference lies in the different existing expectation levels and average strength of feeling.

A great many more users do not want other users cross posting comments from locked posts, and feel much more strongly about it, than the users who want this (specific) ability (aka, ability to crosspost comments from locked posts). In LJ's case, both sides are LJ users, too, so it's harder to balance; the current implementation favors the side of the commentator. LiveJournal compromised in the journal owner's favor by making it so that even people who have comment cross posting on by default won't cross post comments by default--but it's not enough to pacify even though such a thing has a possibility of never happening. Conspiracy theorizing (not hard medical facts or what is actually going on) could claim that LJ's coming down on that side because they'd benefit from people getting drawn into the locked content ecosystem of LJ--it's stickier than public content, maybe they'd see that comment cross posted, with the rest of the context under wraps, and want to create a LiveJournal account or log in with their FB account and get more involved with LJ.

In DW's case, the commentators might not like what Dreamwidth is doing, this is true, but they're not upset Dreamwidth users themselves--Dreamwidth probably could do things to more help them, yes, but tends to err on the side of its users' wishes or spends most effort on user than nonuser requests--which is admittedly less than pure. And a lot of DW users would be very disappointed if they couldn't import their entire journal with comments, or had to jump through approval hoops even though some of their friends may not be around to approve one way or the other. On the other hand, a lot fewer commentators get upset by this (though there are people who do and I don't want to belittle them, as their feelings are as legitimate as the user who wants to import), even though it's something that many, many people have actually experienced when their friends imported their LJs to DW and announced it.

[ferrell]

I think there's essentially no good blanket answer to the issue of comment ownership. Both commenter and entry poster have some legitimate claim to the content in the vast majority of cases. In practice, it's an incredibly small minority of comments that could be reproduced somewhere else that would be of any relevance whatsoever, and of that minority, another incredibly small minority would ever actually be reproduced by the journal owner.

Of that miniscule subset of relevant content that actually has/will be reproduced, I think you pretty much end up with gossip or some other form of high drama as the only real content type. Should service providers care if someone's gossip gets reproduced somewhere else? Probably not.

In a nutshell, I think the entire issue is a big grey area, and there has been a huge blowup over a lot of theoretical grievances that are incredibly unlikely to ever occur. I'd much rather see that kind of reaction in the face of something that truly warrants it, because if every little change gets this sort of reaction, each event is going to have a diminishing effect on the people trying to decide if they really need to revert or significantly change whatever caused the reaction.

[kuangning]

Really, the sticking point is not whether a commenter should be able to repost their comment elsewhere. It's that, in the current setup, the commenter's crossposting does not protect the identity of the original poster. That could be fixed by transferring across the whole comment without giving a link back to the conversation to which the comment was a response, or showing the title of the post. You would then force the comment to stand alone outside the protected context of the entry, because the context does not belong to the commenter, but to the original poster whose business was being discussed under lock. Of course, it would then make crossposting very dull and fewer people would use it, because who wants to read an in-depth comment about some detail of Poster A's life when you can't find out who Poster A is and what the context was?

[kerri]

To me, it differs because a) importing to Dreamwidth is something initiated by the owner of the post that the comments are in reply to and moves the *entire* journal, and b) all entries imported to Dreamwidth retain their same protections/filters as they did on LJ, meaning the same people have access to the information.

Facebook is a completely separate entity. The crossposting to Facebook doesn't at all involve the entire journal, and the permissions that are listed on LJ aren't carried over, meaning that crossposting a comment on an f-locked entry is in direct violation of the security setting of the journal owner.

One could argue that on DW the filters might change, etc, but the same thing could happen on LJ - I could make a f-locked post on LJ & then later make it public, never checking with the people who have commented. Or I could delete the entry, removing all comments. The way these sites are set up already puts more emphasis on putting control in the hands of the person who wrote the entry, not the commenters. This is a change from that.