LiveJournal Feedback

LJ Inbox improvement

2015-04-03T02:21:39Z

Hello again, lj_feedbackers!

Today, we're looking for your thoughts on how the functionality and interface of the LJ Inbox page - http://www.livejournal.com/inbox/ - could be improved. (For newer users or anyone unfamiliar with this page, the Inbox is where you can read any private messages that have been sent to you or see the notifications for the subscriptions you've signed up for, as long as you've chosen for those things to be delivered to the LJ Inbox. More info on the Inbox can be found over here.)

We're going to be redesigning the Inbox page in the upcoming months. While we already have some general ideas for improvement (user-defined folders and labels, the ability to "star" or otherwise mark things as important, etc), we want to be sure to get your ideas as well.

So, some questions to get you started:

1) What functionality of the Inbox do you use the most or find most useful? How would you make those things even better?

2) Are there parts of the Inbox you never use, and why? (Is it because you have no use for them, or are they hard to understand/use, and so on.)

3) What features of your personal email programs would you most like to see made available in the LJ Inbox?

These questions are just a starting point -- don't feel like you need to stick strictly to these questions if it's easier for you to just free-form your answer.

Thanks, and we look forward to hearing your ideas! :)

Writer's Block!

2014-12-24T14:39:07Z

Hello again!

As many of you have likely already seen, we brought back the Writer's Block feature last week! We're so excited to finally get this great feature reinstated. :)

If you're using the redesigned version of the LiveJournal site, you can see the new WB module on the homepage or you can add it as a widget right onto your Friends Feed page. For those using the older version of LiveJournal (or for those who just prefer using the community), you can follow the writersblock community to see each day's question and answer from there. (For those watching the community, sorry about the extra posts there right now -- there's currently a bug where answers from OpenID accounts are being posted by the lj_bot account directly to the community as new entries. This problem should be fixed soon!)

If you haven't tried the feature yet and want more information about it, please see our news post from last week over here.

So this post is to get your feedback about the return of Writer's Block. Have you run into any bugs while answering the prompts? Are there changes you'd like to see regarding how it works, or are there any parts of it you find confusing or hard to use? Have you found the question suggestion process to be simple to use?

Let us know what you think! And be sure to not only answer the day's question but also submit questions you'd like to see used -- we'll be randomly sending v-gifts to a few users for their answers or submitted questions as time goes by.

Thanks! :)

Album Security

2014-10-03T19:47:49Z

Hello everyone!

So we're in the early stages of creating a video hosting service, and wanted to get your input on how to handle an important issue: security.

The video hosting service, much like our image hosting service Scrapbook, will allow you to organize videos by albums (folders) with security levels that are consistent with existing security levels on LiveJournal: Public, Friends Only, Private, and Custom.

What we're trying to decide is if all videos in an album should automatically have their security level set based on the security level of the album, or have a security level entirely independent of it.

Currently, Scrapbook handles this by allowing you to have different security levels for albums and the individual images in that album. We want both the video and image hosting services to handle security the same way, but we also think it's important to see if the way it's already being handled is ideal or not.

The main advantage to having different security levels for images/videos and the albums they are stored in is that it allows you to restrict browsing of the albums with a higher security level, such as Friends Only, while having the individual images or videos public which you can still easily share. The main advantage to having everything be the same is clarity and ease of use, it would be easier to set and know what the security level of your content is.

View Poll: #1984307

Thanks for your feedback, and have a great weekend!

About LiveJournal Video

2014-09-12T19:11:04Z

Hello again, everyone!

Have you ever told one of your friends that you love LiveJournal, but weren't sure how to explain to them what it is or why they should be using it? We've put together a video that can help, and want you to be the first people to see it!

We hope you like it, and please let us know what you think!

New Friends feed customization options

2014-09-05T15:07:29Z

Hi everyone!

Last week, we added a lot of customization options for the Friends feed page. There are several new options for customizing the font, the text colors, the foreground and background colors, and more. This post in the lj_releases community has more information and screenshots of how to get to the new settings.

So for those of you who are using the feed page and have looked through these options, how are the new settings working for you? What's working well and what isn't? What customization options are still missing that you'd like to see added? (Two things already noted in our list are the inability to add a header image, and that some users want to be able to re-size or remove the widget sidebar.)

Please comment with your thoughts on what changes or additions you'd like to see for the feed. And don't worry, the old-style Friends page isn't going anywhere -- http://exampleusername.livejournal.com/friends will still give you the Friends page styled the same as the main journal.

Thanks! :)

(ETA: To clarify a point about these options -- they were only added to the /feed page in the redesigned version of LiveJournal. If you're not seeing this long list of options pop-out of the side when you click the gear icon, then you're not using the new version of LJ.

You'd need to switch to the new version first to then see these new customization options on the /feed page. If you're using the old version of LJ, the home page - http://www.livejournal.com/ - will contain a "Switch to the new version" link in the header bar area.)

Return of Writer's Block

2014-07-31T15:27:12Z

Hi Everyone!

Do you remember Writer's Block, the question of the day that helped inspire your creativity? Well, we are bringing it back! We want to preserve the original idea of Writer's Block, of course, but we also want to increase the focus on writing.

Before we get too far along in restoring it though, we'd like to hear your feedback! Previously, the Writer's Block was a community and a module on the homepage which allowed you to post answers to your journal. Did you get more use out of it on the homepage or within the community? Did you answer mostly through the comments or did you use it to start new blog posts via the homepage module?

For the new Writer's Block, we would like to post a question every weekday except for Friday. On Fridays we'd like to try something a little different and feature a special writing prompt that is designed not only to spark your imagination, but to hone specific writing skills such as character development, tone, or description of setting. What are your thoughts on adding this type of prompt?

Thank you so much in advance! We are very excited about the renewal of this feature!

Facebook & Twitter widgets

2014-07-01T20:44:04Z

We've added 2 new Widgets to the Friends Feed page in the redesigned version of the site which allow you to view your Facebook and Twitter feeds. These were added so you can stay up to date about friends & news at a quick glance without having to fully break away from reading the longer entries you are reading here. We wanted to both describe how these work and get your feedback on anyhing you would like to see changed about these.

Both of these Widgets initially start by asking you to login to Facebook or Twitter. As with all Friends Feed widgets, you can change where they appear in the sidebar or remove them if you're not interested in seeing them.

When you click the login button, you may be redirected to Facebook or Twitter and asked to authorize this login (if you have previously authorized LiveJournal to connect with these services, you might not be asked). Once you have authorized the login, you will be taken back to your Friends Feed and entries will display from your events feed for the service you authorized.

You can repost things from Twitter to LiveJournal using the icon. The repost option is not available for Facebook content.

All other interactions with these widgets act as links to the entry or account on Facebook & Twitter. You cannot comment or reply directly to these, and using these widgets does not pass along information about your LiveJournal account to other members of these services, so your privacy is protected.

So we hope you will try these out a bit, then comment to this post to let us know what you think about the widgets and how we can improve them!

Help us make it easier to find communities & make new friends!

2014-06-16T14:26:21Z

First, we wanted to thank you for all the wonderful feedback you provided in our previous post! A few of the common themes we saw that we wanted to talk more about today are the ideas of using LiveJournal to read and participate in its communities, to meet new people and build meaningful friendships with them, and for having a private or semi-private place where you feel safe to speak openly and honestly about things without having to worry about being judged or having to fear offline repercussions for saying them.

We want to focus on these at the moment because we think these are a big part of what makes LiveJournal special, and that we need to do more to ensure people have these experiences here. One of the things we think needs improvement, for example, is that it can be very difficult to find communities and to meet new friends here. People who are new to LiveJournal don't find it very easy to get tied into the LiveJournal community in a way that allows them to build the connections needed to want to keep coming back. Even for those of you who have been here awhile, your friends page might be less active than you'd like and could benefit from adding new communities or friends, but you might find it difficult to branch out any further than you already have.

We do have some features aimed at highlighting content & communities, but they need some help. The Ratings system that appears on the homepage shows popular content, but not necessarily the best or most relevant posts, and is built on the idea of ranking journals & communities that just doesn't fit well with the way most people use LiveJournal. We also have the Community Directory which we think needs some improvements in design, categories, and ensuring that communities added are relevant to their categories and filtered by language.

Meeting new friends on LiveJournal is currently driven mainly by your efforts. You meet people through communities, find new people through friending memes, or through your existing network of friends. We have things like interest searches and the schools directory, but in practice we're not sure many people actually add friends through these. The interest search feature is also of limited use because it only displays the first 500 journals or communities that added an interest, so the results often shows accounts which are no longer active.

So with that all said, we'd love to hear your thoughts on how we can improve existing features, add new features, or make general changes that would make it easier to find relevant communities, allow people to build & expand their group of friends, and just generally get tied into the LiveJournal community as a whole.

How do you use LiveJournal?

2014-06-02T19:12:04Z

We appreciate all the feedback you have already given us on both the redesign of the site and the recent discussion about a potential +1 feature. With this post, though, we're wanting to get your input on how you use LiveJournal rather than just asking about a specific feature or page on the site. So, with that said, on with the questions!

What are the main reasons you use LiveJournal?

What are the things you love best about us?

What are the features you like most?

What makes LiveJournal special to you?

In your opinion, what do we have that other places don't?

What we're really aiming for here is to see as many of you as possible explain in your own words how you use LiveJournal, and why, so please don't feel like you need to stick strictly to these questions if it's easier for you to answer in another way.

New Feature Idea: Adding a '+1' Feature

2014-05-29T16:36:40Z

Hello!

As noted in our news post a few days ago about the redesign, we want to get better about asking for your feedback on new feature ideas or upcoming changes prior to rolling them out. We'll be reviving this lj_feedback community as part of that endeavor, and this 'new feature idea' post will get things started. (We're still monitoring the redesign post and will have some updates in another news post later about that, so keep commenting there about the redesign.)

Over the past year or two, we've noticed a marked increase in the number of users asking for a "+1" feature on LJ -- a way to indicate you 'like' a particular entry or comment. We have some ideas on how such a feature could work on LJ (while also allowing journal/community owners to decide whether they want to offer that ability on their accounts at all), and want to not only run our ideas past you, but also get your opinions/ideas about it as well.

So first, here's a general list of our thoughts on how we could implement this type of feature (numbered so you can easily reference them in your comments):

1) Terminology. We're going to refer to this feature idea as "+1" throughout this entry for ease of use, and because it's the term that's already used heavily by LiveJournal users to denote agreement to a particular comment. Other possibilities might be "like" or a graphic-only button, such as an up-arrow or a thumbs-up type of image. (For the remainder of this post, we will use "+1" in our terminology for simplicity, but please comment with your other ideas or thoughts about the term/icons to use.)

2) Visibility. There are several ways to give people control over a +1 feature. We're leaning towards the idea that each account (whether a personal journal or a community owner/maintainer) would have control over whether to display the +1 feature for their journal. To allow control, we'd put in a toggle option somewhere, either in the style options or the display settings. So if you didn't want viewers to be able to +1 things on your journal, then you'd just be able to turn it off.

3) Comments only, or both comments/entries. The ability to +1 something could potentially be applicable to both Comments and Entries. If only one of these is wanted, a simple 'on/off' setting for each journal/community would make sense. If available for both entries and comments, a setting where you would chose which items you wanted to show the +1 ability on: Comments Only, Entries Only, or Comments and Entries Both. (And of course a 'None' option to turn the feature off for that account.)

So which of these items (entries and/or comments) would you want to have +1 ability for?

View Poll: #1969968

4) Viewing/sorting. How to view +1's is a little different from whether or not people want to display them at all. It seems that when viewing a journal/comm that has the +1 feature activated, it would be best for the viewer to have the control over how they want to see comments ordered. Does the viewer want to see comments chronologically, or ranked by the most/least +1's? To allow this control, a setting could be added so you could choose your preferred/default sort order (it could be an account setting so that it will 'stick' better than it does for some other sites), but then you'd be able to select a different option on a per entry basis as well.

So, there's our thoughts on how such a feature could work. Please comment with your thoughts and ideas about it -- anything jump out as missing, do you have a preference for any of the possible options, do you not want this implemented, are there additional options or functionality you want to suggest, etc?

Thanks, and we look forward to hearing your thoughts on it! :)

Edit: We've been reading through your comments, and appreciate all the very thoughtful and constructive feedback you have provided! The reaction has been quite mixed, with some people in favor of the idea, but also many against it primarily due to concerns that this type of feature could be too trivial of a way for people to respond to something and lead to less comments of substance being posted. Given your feedback, we feel that the best option is to not move forward with developing/adding this feature to LiveJournal at this time.

IP logging

2011-06-10T19:39:45Z

Based on the response we received to our release notes to lj_releases, we have removed the recent change which displayed the country & city information of commenters when IP logging is enabled. We want to note, however, that comment IP logging has been a feature on LiveJournal for a very long time, and that the city & country information has always been publicly available to anyone who has your IP address.

However, based on the concerns over privacy this issue has raised, we are reconsidering our stance on having an IP logging feature on our site, and wanted to get your opinions about this before making any further changes. Please note that while we are including a poll, well thought out comments which explain why you feel this feature should or should not be available will be given a great deal of consideration in any decision we make about this feature.

View Poll: IP logging

Help evaluate our Help Center!

2010-08-26T17:14:15Z

We're currently evaluating our Help Center and FAQs. We hope you'll take a few minutes to tell us about your experiencing using the FAQs. Your feedback will help us determine what changes are necessary to improve support on LiveJournal.

View Poll: Help Center/FAQs

Thank you for your input!

Help us steer site navigation!

2010-03-16T22:31:02Z

As you probably noticed, we recently redesigned the LiveJournal global navigation menu to improve site useability, based on input we received from both new and experienced users. Our goal is to make LiveJournal features and products as intuitive and easy-to-use as possible. At this juncture, we'd like to get your detailed suggestions on what you like and what you think we can do better. This will help guide additional modifications and enhancements. Please try to be as specific as possible, since we want to aggregate common issues. We thank you, in advance, for helping us improve the LiveJournal experience for all of our users.

My Guests

2009-07-29T23:51:43Z

Beginning today, you'll be shown an interstitial asking you to select a visibility setting for an upcoming feature called My Guests. The default setting is for My Guests to be turned off, but the dialog box will keep appearing until you make a selection.

Even though this feature won't be released for a few more weeks, we wanted to give you the ability to make a choice now and provide you with information on how My Guests will work.

My Guests will show you a list of all of the logged-in users who have visited your journal directly, except for those who have opted out of this feature
It will not show users who view your entries on their friends page; only those who have navigated to your journal, entry, or comment pages
The list will show only the last 100 users; information older than that will not be stored or viewable
My Guests will be updated hourly
It will not show the same user multiple times; only the last view by any user will be displayed
If you choose not to be visible in the My Guests view of other users, you will not be able to view your own guests; participation in visibility is required in order to use this feature
In order to prevent "gaming" of this feature (as in, someone turning off the feature just long enough to view someone's journal undetected and then turning it back on), the setting takes up to 24 hours to update once it's been changed.

My Guests is part of a larger project to bring you more information on who is viewing your journal. If you have questions or comments about this interstitial or the settings, or general questions about how My Guests will work, this is the place!

New mobile interface

2009-07-29T22:58:55Z

For those of you who browse LiveJournal when you're on your mobile device, we've got a new interface for you! We'd like you to give it a try and let us know what you think.

From your mobile browser, just go to: http://m.livejournal.com/

In the next build we'll be adding:

1. Selection of security level when posting
2. Viewing of your syndicated feeds on your friends page

If you find things you like, don't like, or things you'd like changed, please feel free to share in comments to this post. Developers will be reading them as they update this feature.

Finding Your Friends

2008-10-09T22:50:20Z

Coming Soon: The Find Your Friends Feature!

LiveJournal users love the way their Friends page serves as a single location for all the latest updates from the people they care about. For new users, however, it can be hard to find people to add to their Friends page because they don’t know anyone on LiveJournal yet. Often they have friends already using LiveJournal but don’t know they're here or how to find them.

We're working on a new Find Your Friends feature that will make it easier for new users to find existing friends using their web-based email contacts list. Once found, they'll be able to quickly add those journals to their Friends page or send a note telling the person about their new journal. Note that only logged-in users will be able to use this feature.

However, we know that your privacy is important to you -- not all users want to be found, even by people they already know in "the real world" (sometimes especially by people they already know in the real world). So we're working to ensure that this feature provides a variety of security settings to reflect the various ways in which someone would want or not want to be found.

The current options for sharing your email address are limited to choosing whether or not your email address is displayed publicly on your Profile page, which in turn determines whether the email address is searchable as well. On your Edit Profile page, you can currently use the "Show my email address to:" field to select from the following options:

Everyone

Registered Users Only

Friends Only

Nobody

If you select Everyone, then your journal can be found when someone searches for your email address using the Email option in the LiveJournal search box; if you select any of the other three, then your journal cannot be found through an email search.

The Find Your Friends feature will search your web-based email contacts to see if there are any matches on LiveJournal. With the new tool, we're divorcing the concepts of searchability and visibility. You will be able to have your email address searchable without actually displaying it anywhere on LiveJournal, or you can choose to display your email address without it being searchable by the Find Your Friends feature.

We're asking for your thoughts and feedback to help ensure the available settings for this feature have the level of privacy that you want.

The new setting will be "Allow others to find me by searching for my email address:" and it will have these options:

Yes -- show my username in the search results

Yes -- but don't show my username in the search results. Only show my email address and allow users to send me a notification about their new journal. I can then choose to add them as a Friend if/when I want to.

No -- don't allow my email address to be searchable.

For new users, their email address will be searchable and their username shown through this feature until they make a selection otherwise - but during the signup process (specifically, the Find Your Friends portion) the option will be presented and explained. Existing users will be presented with an opt-in page after the feature is launched so they can make the specific choice that best fits their personal preference. If no choice is made, existing users will have the option defaulted to "No."

Please comment to ask questions or suggest ways in which this feature could be improved -- we want to ensure that your privacy is protected while making this feature as useful as possible. Thank you!

feedback on profile page redesign

2008-07-11T22:27:31Z

See this post in lj_design for details.

Community maintainers and moderators

2008-07-02T13:34:49Z

We've been having some conversations about how to avoid a co-maintainer removing other maintainers. As part of that, we are looking to expand the rights of community moderators - so that maintainers can appoint moderators to help them with a community, instead of co-maintainers. What do you think a moderator should be able to do in a community?

View Poll: Should moderators be able to:

Also, what about a feature that would not let a maintainer remove a maintainer who had been appointed before them (like a seniority of maintainers)?

View Poll: Maintainer removal

We'd like to hear what you think - comments are welcome!

What comment below do you think best represents your position? (Click "Link" that's right after the time and date in the comment you like best, and cut and paste the URL here. You can change your response at any time by clicking on the poll number, and then clicking the [ Fill out Poll ] link at the top of the page.)

View Poll: Goat vote

TXTLJ Notifications

2008-05-22T22:02:14Z

Back in December of 2006, we introduced TXTLJ, a feature which lets you interact with LiveJournal from your mobile phone. We'd like to know your thoughts on using this feature for notifications. If you haven't tried it before, here's how it works:

When you click the button (or "Track this" on some layouts), you'll get the option to get notifications for that event (comments on an entry, new post in a journal or community, or events like birthdays or new userpics uploaded by your friends) that will look like this:

If you've entered your mobile phone number here, you can choose to get those notifications on your cell phone by selecting "TXTLJ." Plus, Paid, and Permanent accounts get 3, 10, or 15 notifications free each month.

If you haven't tried this before and think this might be anything you'd be interested in using, can you please try it out and let us know what you think? You can check any and all that apply, and additional comments you have would be very welcome!

View Poll: TXTLJ notifications

Indication of Custom Friends Groups on Entries

2008-02-08T20:59:54Z

Hi guys! One feature that many of you have wanted for a very long time is some indication when entries are posted to custom friends groups. Right now, these entries show the normal Friends-only lock icon, so neither the poster nor the viewers of the entry know that the entry is filtered (the poster can find out by editing the entry, but not by viewing it).

The team has been discussing this, and we've realized that there may be a split opinion on who should be able to see that an entry is filtered (and to which groups the entry is filtered). I'm pretty sure no one would object to the poster/journal owner seeing this information on an entry, but some people may or may not want the viewers of the entry (those who have the ability to read it) to see the information too. So, we decided we wanted to see what you guys thought about it.

If you have a very strong opinion either way, feel free to give your reasons for it in the comments. Thanks!

View Poll: Custom Friends Groups Options

Edit: Thanks for your feedback! We have implemented this feature as the majority of you wanted it (only viewable to the journal owner). You can read about it here.

horizon and vertigo

2007-06-08T03:32:41Z

Horizon's been out of beta for quite some time now, but we've made some changes (and hopefully some bugfixes), so we wanted to send it through another round of beta-testing before making the changes to Horizon itself. And Vertigo -- well, we're getting close to finally releasing it from beta. :)

So, check out the beta versions of Horizon or Vertigo and give us your feedback! Does something look weird in your browser? If so, let us know! Make sure to include the browser (and version) that you're using so we can try to narrow down problems. Let us know what you think!

homepage

2007-05-17T21:21:08Z

We'd love to hear your feedback about the new homepage! Fill out the poll, then comment with any thoughts you've got :)

View Poll: #986720

new themes

2007-01-13T00:58:19Z

We've read over your comments to the previous post and pulled together a bunch of them for another round of voting. We didn't include any suggestions that are already available on Vox (since we'll be adding those anyway) or if the suggested theme resembles one of the existing themes. We'll be making about 10-20 themes based on the top winners in this poll. So, feel free to check off your five favorites. Honor system. ;)

View Poll: #905719

more Q&A

2006-11-02T07:07:29Z

We've all, uh, kind of been busy lately. But we haven't forgotten! I have a small round of stuff this time, and hopefully more will be coming soon. (If your question hasn't been answered yet -- don't worry, we've still got a list of everyone's questions.)

prettygolucky: Are you guys going to eventually include a messaging system on LJ, or would you at least consider it? I.M.'s, that is (kind like the MySpace system, but better since LJ is better than MySpace anyway).

-- Yes, we are! We've finally launched LJ Talk, which is basically an IM system that's integrated with LiveJournal directly. It uses the Jabber framework, so we're able to communicate with people from different services as well (for example, you can talk to someone on Google Talk). Check it out -- I've been using it for a few months now, and I find it really convenient to use.

eloisem: Are you planning on implementing any web 2.0 features into LJ, for instance a box that pops up when you hover over a username to quickly navigate to their profile, add them as a friend, etc. (Kind of like how it is on Vox?)

-- In the time since you asked this question, we did! We implemented the "contextual hover menus", that appear whenever you hover over the icon in someone's username (like frank). (If you don't like these menus, you can turn 'em off at the Viewing Options page.)

gethenix: Anyway to have a feature where we can see who on our flist is currently online?

-- Kind of. If someone's logged into LJ Talk, you can see that they're online with either the contextual hover menus, or by looking at their profile, right under the "LJ Talk" listing.

japantherine -- Who was the first person to sign up for a journal that wasn't part of the makers/maintinace?

-- One of bradfitz's friends! Brad originally created the site to keep in touch with his friends, so the first several dozen users were Brad's friends.

desdema -- Is it really that hard to add a delete button to the "Edit Memorable Entry" pages? (Yes, I know how to delete a comment with the current setup.)

-- Heh, good suggestion! I'll add it to my list of things to try to do when I get some free time to dig into the code for that. (The ever-fantastic coffeechica wants me to point out that if you're not as memories-savvy as desdema is, you can find information on deleting memories in our FAQ.)

blossombunny -- In the future, is it possible to add a mood theme and music section to the comments area? (i hope you understand that)

-- It's certainly possible, but I don't think it's something we'll be doing. In general, comments aren't as "feature-rich" as entries are -- you don't have the full range of options and whatnot with comments as you do with entries -- so we avoid adding extra fields to comments. If you want to mention your mood/music, you can just say so in the comment itself. ;)

kremmen -- There are options for placeholders for big pictures and video. Why isn't there be one to insert automatic cuts in long posts? To cut all posts on one's friends page to an arbitrary max length would be an even more useful option than either of those.

-- We offer the placeholder options for people who are browsing over a slow connection, browing from a public place (or work), or for people who just plain don't want to have Flash video appearing on their Friends pages. So it's more a concern for loading time than anything else; browsers can generally handle text perfectly fine. So we've never actually seen a pressing need for a "automatically cut any post longer than X characters option".

But, I will say that it'd likely be one heck of a feature to code up. janinedog was working on something somewhat related a few months ago, and after squinting at the code for a while, and asking around for other opinions or insights, we could never get it to work quite right. (Auto-cuts cause serious problems if the cut lands somewhere in the middle of some HTML, like a table or an image or something.) And ultimately, the demand for this sort of thing isn't worth spending the time it'd take to get it right.

stillimage -- Why does the Frank radio not work? Do you ask before you stream the voice posts?

-- FRNK Radio only works when there are voiceposts queued up to play. If there haven't been any public voiceposts in a certain amount of time (I'm not sure how long), then you won't hear anything when you try to "tune in", unfortunately. We don't ask permission from each individual before including their voiceposts here, but we only include public voiceposts -- anything that's protected at the time that it's posted won't be included.

aileron -- Are there plans of implementing cross-posting features between LJ and vox?

We don't currently have plans for being able to import from one to another (they're both Six Apart services, but they don't share a common database backend, so we'd have to build an import system from scratch), but it might be possible in the future. More likely, there may be a way to cross-post an entry to both Vox and LJ at the same time, but I don't think there are any plans to do that, at least not in the near future.

More Q & A

2006-09-29T05:18:21Z

Here's a few more:

luckycyberbunny -- Say I do a project for school or something, and I get a bunch of people signed up for LJ... do I get an honor or something?

We don't have anything official in place for something like this, but we have discussed something similar to it in the past. To my knowledge, it's not something currently in the works, but that doesn't mean it'll never happen either. With the way LiveJournal's account types are setup, chanced are something like this would have to be restricted to referring new people who end up with paid account, otherwise it could be abused by people fairly easily.

lauren -- Why don't you allow users to change usernames for free up to a certain number of times?

Username changes are something we want to discourage people from doing lightly, which has always been the reason for there being a cost to renaming. It can cause a lot of confusion among someone's friends, and is generally something we only want people to do if they just can't stand that username they picked years ago, but dont want to lose all of their entries by creating a new journal with the username they want.

adudeabides -- Could I buy LJ/6A (assuming I had the cash)?

Probably not, but I'm sure every website has it's price. ;)

sunkistsoda -- how about making an easier suggestion system?

I don't think the suggestions system itself is currently difficult, the thing that makes it hard in some cases is the sheer number of suggestions that already exist. I'm not really sure there's any other system that would make this any easier to handle, but if you have any ideas on how to improve it, feel free to suggest them!

starletfallen -- Have you ever considered giving Frank the Goat a cohort? Like... an evil bunny of doom or something?

But Frank is so incredibly awesome as is, what cohort could possibly do anything other than diminish his greatness?

darkenedminds -- I hate that users can add my 99% friendsonly LJ to their friends list without my consent - particularly troll journals. is there any feature in the works to make friending between users a consentual thing? Make a friends request, then accept/decline?

When someone adds you to their friends page, it doesn't give them access to your friends only entries. It just means any entries you post that you've given them access to read will show up on their friends page, which is what they could see just by looking at your journal. I think the problem with this is the simple fact that everything's referred to as "friends", which brings on the next 3 questions:

efbq -- When will I be able to rename 'friends' and 'friend of' on my info page?

kineticfactory -- What happened to the proposal to split the "friend" relation into separate trust/subscription relations?

natalief -- Why on *earth* is it called a Friends list?

The origin of the whole friends page/friends list came from way back when the site was created with the intent of friends being able to keep in touch with each other. There weren't any other sites like this out there yet, and a lot of the problems that are now around nobody really anticipated then. At the time, nobody thought that just because I want to read someone's journal doesn't mean I want them reading mine.

We've discussed splitting up friends relations in the past, and it's still something we'd like to do at some point, but we just haven't had the time to squeeze it in. For the people who haven't followed this in the past, the issue is that adding someone to your friends list currently does 2 things: It allows you to view that person's entries on your friends page (the entries they've given you access to view, that is), and it allows them access to any entries you've posted using the 'Friends Only' security level.

The idea here was to split it up so that you could subscribe to someone's journal without having to let them view your friends only entries, or grant them access to view your Friends Only entries without having theirs show up on your friends page. Technically, you can do all of this already if you use custom filters and edit the "Default View" filter, or use the notification system but that seems like too much work for fairly basic functionality, and we'd like to eventually change it. It's one of those things I can't say we have any sort of ETA on, but it's definitely something we're still planning on doing.

As to actually having the ability to rename 'friends' and 'friend of' (or whatever they might be changed to in the future), it's probably unlikely that users would be given the ability to edit the actual names of these fields. If this were possible, it woudln't be long before people started changing 'friends' to things along the line of 'idiots' and start adding people they dont like or just as many random people as they can find. We'll likely pick standard wording for these, but we'll make sure to pick a term that's less loaded than "Friends" is!