On Fri, 23 Jan 2009, Isabeau wrote: > The restriction on backdating is irrelevant
To sticky posts, yes. To Lee Ann and me, not so much. If we use the code for the site we're contemplating--or if we decided to move our stuff to DW or a DW-based site run by someone else, not that I foresee that at this point in time, but things do change--this is something we would very much want. (It may not be relevant to anyone else though. If nobody else says they're interested in this after they've heard me thinking out loud about it, we'll take it off list.) > -- the "problem" is the way journals and communities sort > entries. In particular, even if backdating were possible in > communities, the entry still wouldn't stay at the top of the > page. Right, but the reason we want backdating in communities is not because we want the post to stay at the top of the page. It's because we run an RPG/group fiction project, and it would be nice, when someone has a brilliant idea for a backstory post, to actually be able to post it to the comm at the LW-date and time at which other things were posted that happened on that LW-date and time. The way people's minds work, when they read things in a certain order, they tend to think of them as happening in that order, so we've long banned backdated posts (i.e. posts that have a note in them that say, "OOC: I know we're posting this at game date 7 July, but it really happened on game date 23 June, except that was finals week for me.") to the community because they appear at the top of the page, and confuse people who, even though they see the backdate notice, remember that that post was on the board with the other posts near it and that they read them together so they must have happened together unconsciously. Now it may be that we're the only people who have a use for this feature, in which case we'll shut up and stop spamming :) But I think we might not be. Anyone who is using a community to post a group or even a personal work in progress might benefit from the ability to post things as they finish them and have them appear in the order that fits the chronology of the work. > Without getting too technical: Personal journals sort entries > by the date given in the entry. The theory is that most of the > time, you're going to write in chronological order. True, unless you're writing fiction. We use backdate in personal journals for a lot of things in LW and I've used it in other RP/fiction projects. > So a future-dated entry will always show up at the top, > because that's the most recent according to entry dates. The > backdate option evolved, for various reasons that I won't get > into, as a "yes I know this entry is being posted out of order" > flag, because otherwise LJ complains that you're posting out of > order. I thought it evolved so that backdated posts don't show up on friends-pages. Interesting. > Community journals, OTOH, sort entries by the server date/time > when they were posted. This happens because multiple people > are going to be posting to communities, and they may be living > in different time zones. If someone posts at 2:30pm EST, and > five minutes later someone posts at 11:35pm PST, the second > post is going to appear above the first one because, even > though it has an earlier time, it was posted later. (The same > logic is used for friends pages, ftr: in both cases, you don't > want to miss seeing an entry just because it has an earlier > timestamp.) This is true, but in recapping the community, I've noticed that communities DO sort by the date given on the entry, rather than the server date/time, on the archive view. (Which is annoying for a recapper, because if someone writes a letter on the East Coast and the reply is written on the West Coast, the reply shows up first in the archive view.) > Because there isn't the same restriction on chronological order, you > don't need to flag any entries with "backdate" -- but also, > future-dating a post doesn't keep it at the top. So, the problem with what *we want* to do is that the post that we back-date will still show up on the server time and date. And if we changed that, people in time zones would have to post on the time and date they want the post to show up. (We could live with that, if the software would allow us to actually date things in the 1940s--we'd just give them the dates and times that they "really" happened on--and that would actually save us the grief of having to choose only styles that don't make the 2009 date huge compared to the subject line, which has the game date in it--but other communities who want this functionality for different reasons might not like that.) I see why this would be seen as undesirable by many people; I can also see why as an option, some people might still want it. ~Kiri :) **************************************************************** Azalais Aranxta (~malfoy) ataniell93 on LiveJournal and Vox http://groups.yahoo.com/group/malfoymadness "I know the true world, and you know I do. But we needn't let it think we all bow down." --Christopher Fry _______________________________________________ dw-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dwscoalition.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dw-discuss
