Andrew Ducker <[email protected]> suggested: > Some (maybe even a lot) of people have custom posting lists where they > ask people if they want to be on their "cat photo" filter. They then > have to follow comments/poll entries, add/remove people by hand, etc. to > allow them access.
Yes, and I've wanted a reader-controlled solution instead ever since tags were announced. Like Mark Smith and Azalais Aranxta, I've always seen this as a feature most reasonably implemented by allowing people to subscribe to subsets of someone's journal based on tags, very similar to what Joshua Kronengold described tangentially while clarifying a different aspect of WTF-lists (message-ID <[email protected]>, timestamped Tue, 13 Jan 2009 15:51:00 -0600, if you want to find the message). I hadn't worked out an exact syntax to use, but Joshua's is not inconsistent with what I had in mind: < What I'd -love- to see here is either whole-journal or < filter-level constraints that let you limit to or exclude specific < tags -- so you can watch at loudfriend-meme-quiz rather than the < entire journal, or gamingfriend+theory to view only posts tagged < theory (in your journal or in a specific filter). This would, among < other things, remove one of the big uses of trust lists, but that's < cool; it's better to use it this way anyway. I also think it would be < useful to be able to express a filter in terms of other filters -- < this filter contains everyone -not- in my comics or close filters, etc. As Joshua described, this could be applied to sub-filters of your watchlist, so your default filter might include, say, dglenn-long-politics-dream while your "I'm busy and just skimming" filter could include dglenn+qotd+status and your "I'm reading everything I'm interested in at all" filter may include dglenn-meme This does put onto authors the responsibility of using tags consistently, but your solution similarly requires them to assign filters for their posts the same way. Furthermore, not only does this seem more logically a tags-feature (the custom filters workaround is just that: a workaround for the lack of this capability using tags), it also gets around the problem of folks who are using these filters _only_ to allow their friends to opt out of seeing certain classes of entry, rather than for their own privacy! If a journalholder has a "knitting" filter specifically to avoid boring hir non-knitting friends, with a tag-based solution a reader no longer has to be on hir trust- (currently friends-) list to see posts that sie has no other reason to screen than that, about knitting. Posts that _should_ remain friends-locked can be handled by putting them under general friends-lock and tagging them so that the people permitted to see them can choose whether to filter them out or not; and any filters that are for the privacy and/or convenience of the poster rather than opt-in filters for the convenience of their readers, would still be handled as custom trust-filters as they are now. AFAICT, there's all win and no lose here, doing this with tags, as long as this doesn't put unexpected strain on the database. This, really, is exactly what I expected tags to be when they were first announced, and have been waiting to see ever since. As long as I'm nattering on about tags, a question: the last time I crawled through the API docs (long after tags were added, but several months ago by now), I was unable to find any way for a client to set tags at posting time. The main reason I _stopped_ using tags was that it was too much of a PITA to go back in my browser and add tags by hand after posting using Clive (a nuisance compounded by my crossposting to multiple sites). I _think_ I understand how to add a tag option to Clive if I know the property to set and its syntax. Has that been added to the docs yet, or does someone who's had their fingers in the code recently happen to remember seeing what I'm looking for? -- Glenn (dgl...@ij/CJ/etc.) _______________________________________________ dw-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dwscoalition.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dw-discuss
