Reading filters?

[brownbetty]

I really like (although I know some people find the adjustment difficult) the distinction between people you read, and people you want to have access, because that is how I have always thought of friending on lju anyway, and the unfortunate conjunction was just something I had to hack around.

BUT: some of my filters on lj were reading filters so that I could have separate pages, not because I distinguish between the people who I friend, and the people I actually read, just because sometimes I wanted to catch up on my friends, and sometimes I wanted to catch up on communities, and sometimes I wanted to catch up on syndicated feeds. Like, for example, you can go to http://brown-betty.livejournal.com/friends/communities and see just the communities I'm subscribed to. (I believe.)

Is that no longer possible on DW?

Comments

[azurelunatic]

Separate manually-controlled reading groups is one of the things that broke in the read/access split, and it hasn't been put back in yet. But it is planned.

Automatic reading groups, like personal journals vs. communities, is around somewhere; it's one of the things that got kept from LJ. FAQ here: http://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=76

[brownbetty]

Wait wait wait, that can be done automagically? I did it by hand.

*facepalm*

[elynross]

This is one reason I activated the navbar at the top here on DW, and actually started using it on LJ: it gives you a dropdown to select All Friends/Subs, Journals Only, Communities Only, or Feeds. On LJ it also lists all your personal filters, and presumably it eventually will on DW, when reading filters are activated.

[copracat]

It's one of the reasons I love the navbar and don't understand why people hate it. Okay, yes, it can make you're beautiful, delicately crafted layout look a bit rubbish, hanging out there on top, but it's so damn useful and on DW even more useful because it tells you if there's anything in your inbox. I'm thinking of turning off all email notification because the nav bar makes inbox access so easy, and not two clicks away like it is on LJ.

[azurelunatic]

Yeah.

One of the things that's been an exercise in ... something ... for me as someone who still straddles LJ support and DW support, is how stuff that's been around on LJ for ages is getting dusted off and being discovered by people. On the one hand, it is awesome that people now know this; on the other hand, it's sort of appalling as an LJ support person how many people didn't realize it was possible on LJ.

[beck_liz]

it's sort of appalling as an LJ support person how many people didn't realize it was possible on LJ.

For some of us, it's sort of appalling how long we didn't realize it was there. It makes us feel terribly inobservant. :-)

I think it might be a good idea to at the very least have some sort of list somewhere of all the nifty bells and whistles, both on LJ and DW, because clearly, lots of users are still missing this stuff.

Comms like the newly formed dw_nifty will be of a help too, of course, but something more official would probably be good, too.

[azurelunatic]

tipoftheday never really caught on, over at LJ; I'm not sure what it would take to a) revitalize that (probably a dedicated volunteer who knows how to shake out the hiding-in-plain-sight), and b) what it would take for something of the like to work at DW.

I think moonie is something shaped like a volunteer coordinator. You might want to bounce over there and share the Great Idea. ;)

[brownbetty]

Maybe there could be a "Did you know you can..." thingbob. An FAQ "So, what else is there I might not know about that I can do with this?" that is just a set of links. Something.

[matgb]

For some of us, it's sort of appalling how long we didn't realize it was there. It makes us feel terribly inobservant. :-)

Yup. I'm finding stuff, and I've been hacking around looking for tricks for ages. But the fault isn't with the users, it's with LJ—the usability of LJ sucks, and sucked for a long long time.

A decent feature shouldn't be something that you need to know to look for, it shouldn't be something you find buried on a page deep in the site map.

It should just be there and work. Because most users won't ever go and look for it—a lot of my friends still don't know about reading or posting filters, let alone Default View, or that you can publicly link to your filters by name (my main viewing filters are in my LJ sidebar deliberately).

So what we all need to be doing is getting all the nifty stuff linked in the right place in the site schemes, which means tracking it.

Personal top of the list for me is the "your styles" page, hidden under advanced, but it saves all your customisations from previous layouts after you switch, I'd completely forgotten it existed on LJ, found some old link code I'd lost in switch and other cool stuff.

[ratcreature]

Well, you don't really go out looking for features, you just muddle through. I created a community filter by hand before I found out by chance that you could do this automatically too. I didn't have the navbar enabled, and I could hardly intuit that attaching letters to the URL would do something, and only finally found out when some person whose LJ I was browsing had put the links in their sidebar, so I saw the URL version with the "c" for comms attached. Even after that I always forgot what you had to do to see feeds.

And it's not like the reading filter page says something like "If you want to create a reading filter beyond the standard f-list display options (people, comms, feeds) you can do that here" either, or anything to cross-reference the other thing, iirc. While I wouldn't want some annoying paperclip always second-guessing what I intend to do, some references to obscure related features wouldn't go amiss within the text, IMO.

[jennem]

Is there any kind of timetable for when this will be fixed? The automatic filters help (though you can't set one as your default for your reading page), but I'm still freaking out in a mildly OCD way that I can't have it exactly the way that I want it. :D ;)

[azurelunatic]

This will be fixed before the full launch of the site; if you're so inclined, the official bug entry for it is here, and you can check it out/lurk/try your hand at writing a patch: http://bugs.dwscoalition.org/show_bug.cgi?id=166

[jennem]

Thanks!

[isis]

Yeah, I'm hoping this gets fixed during the beta process as well - I divide my flist into three parts (roughly by fandom/shared interest) plus communities divided by fandom, for a (current) total of 7 separate subgroups all neatly accessible from sidebar links.

[draconic_voices]

If you have the navigation bar set for your journal then when you are looking at your reading page there should be a drop down menu of filters with Journals only, Communities only, and syndicated feeds.

If you don't have the navigation bar turned on, then add:

?show=P for Journals
?show=C for communities
?show=F for feeds

to the end of the web address.

If that doesn't work try adding &filter=0

like so: ?show=P&filter=0

[melannen]

I am considering (not doing yet, just considering) turning my OpenID reading lists into the equivalent of my old filters. You can make an essentially arbritary number of validated OpenIDs with a little creativity, and have a separate reading list for each.

(This got somewhat less urgent when I realized there was a built-in users vs communities filter. Mind you, I found it via the links on the profile page; I hadn't noticed the dropdown on the navbar until I read this post, sigh.)

[pne]

Though that's of limited value if people on your reading list frequently make protected entries; they'd have to add all your OpenID accounts to their access lists, too.

(And I think that wouldn't work at all for members-only community entries, since AFAIK OpenID accounts can't join communities and so can't be on their access lists.)