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

[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.