> I am sure that there must still be some maintainers on LJ who think a given > community is "their" community.
The community belongs to the maintainer, the content belongs to the authors. This is a legal distinction of which many if not most community maintainers may be ignorant. > I have asked about importing communities to Dreamwidth because people *in > the communities*, both maintainers and not, are asking about it. That is, in > fact, almost invariably the very first thing I am asked about when it comes > to Dreamwidth. And they are asking about it in terms of wanting the whole > shebang moved, not having one foot in LJ and the other in Dreamwidth. Yes, it is entirely possible that an entire community wants to move to DW and wants their entries moved, and have even given their consent to the entries being moved etc., but DW has no way to verify this - even if we were to do as you suggested previously and post a poll or use some other mechanism to get permission from every single person who has ever posted to the community, it would be *FAR* too labor-intensive for DW's limited staff and volunteers to verify this permission for every community that wants to import. Even LiveJournal, which has an arguably much bigger volunteer base and a larger staff, wouldn't be able to take on this kind of task. > From a maintainer's perspective, I can tell you it would be a heck of a lot > easier to lock the door on a community at LJ, post an announcement telling > everyone 'Hey, we've moved to Dreamwidth' and starting from scratch at the > new digs. That's the simplest thing to do, period. But it does nothing to > serve the members of an existing community who have put their time, > interest, and talents into building up that community's content. A lot of > people have an emotional investment in the living history of a community, > and if presented with the choice between moving to newer, posher quarters > with all sorts of technical improvements but without any of that context, > and staying where their history lives, they'll just stay put. And that's fine - if that's what they choose to do, that's great! DW is an alternative option, and if people don't want to take advantage of that, that's their own decision. If something like community imports will stop them from moving, then I'm sorry I won't see them on dreamwidth.org, but the hurdles are at this moment entirely too big to overcome in any period of time I'd label "soon". > Dreamwidth will be a great place for new communities in new fandoms. But as > it stands, it is not friendly to the migration of existing ones, especially > not for reference-oriented comms, which depend on the very existence of > their body of entries to work. It's also strange that the service (possibly > not through the conscious effort of the dev team) has been pitched as The > Great White Hope for Fandom, when it's really not suited to easy use by the > large base of existing fan communities. I'm not sure where you've been seeing this "pitch", at least not from an official source -- fandom-friendly, yes, but not the be-all and end-all of existence. However, this discussion is probably best-suited for another thread. > | Comments are a gray-enough area as it is... > | ... > | Unfortunately, the same solution (OpenID attribution) just won't work for > community entries > | without a great deal of code work. > Yes, that is a *very* grey area. If the argument is being made that a > commenter has any less right to the content they created than someone who > created content by making a post to a semi-public community, I'd consider > that argument specious at best. I can tell you for my part, the fact that > the importer *does* allow for comment importation now confuses me somewhat, > since I've been told repeatedly and vehemently this evening that copying > other people's content without their explicit and advance permission for > each individual circumstance is evil, or at the very least likely to lead to > serious legal trouble. Since the comments' authors have a ready-made, easy-to-use solution to be able to log in and delete their comments (attribution to the correct OpenID and the ability to use said OpenID to log in to Dreamwidth), I don't see any issues with this. No argument has ever been made (to my knowledge) that those who posted comments do not retain rights to those comments. Certainly, under LiveJournal's Terms of Service, no distinction is made between comments and entries as far as the rights you retain in that content after it has been posted. > The lack of a ready technological solution to the apparent > community-continuity/individual-creator-rights dichotomy does not mean that > importation is something that shouldn't be worked on. Nobody has said that it won't be - but it won't be released to the public until the rights-ownership issue can be resolved. Denise has already made that clear in a previous post to this very list. > Nor does it call for people to belittle the folks looking to help their > friends and the people > they maintain communities for make a happy, comfortable transition to > Dreamwidth. I certainly don't think that I've done so, but if I have, I apologize (and please point out where I did so, off-list). > No, I haven't been around since Dreamwidth was a mere gleam in > Denise and Mark's eyes, nor do I work on LJ's staff. Perhaps the viewpoint > of the average lay user of LiveJournal is something the development team > could stand to hear a little more of, because if Dreamwidth wants to be a > viable business, the staff—both volunteer and paid—are going to have to be > prepared to play nicely with a much wider user base than the code-jockeying > power users who have been around since LJ's infancy. It certainly seems to me that Mark, Denise, and the project leaders have been listening to a wide array of viewpoints on this issue, including those who have never volunteered or been employed by LJ or any of the other journal sites. Also, please rest assured that the volunteer team and staff of Dreamwidth have many, many collective years of experience dealing with all sorts of customers and users (including all types of LJ users). --ryan _______________________________________________ dw-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dwscoalition.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dw-discuss
