| Speaking (unofficially, of course) from the perspective of a | LiveJournal Abuse Prevention Team member, the core problem with | community imports is that the community maintainer who orders the | import is not requesting their own content to be republished - it's | content that belongs to other people, the users who individually | posted the entries in the community. | ... | The loss of control over the content that has been posted is an | overriding issue, and is honestly much more important than the | maintainer's convenience in moving their community to DW.
I am sure that there must still be some maintainers on LJ who think a given community is "their" community. I've had the dubious pleasure of meeting a few, and their outlook is not one I share. As a maintainer, I'm there to help the users. I don't think being a maintainer somehow makes me better than the rest of the people who participate in a community. I don't think it grants me greater entitlement to the content than the members have. I am, in essence, the janitor. And if need be, the sheriff. I'm not Lord High Muckety-Muck of anything. 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. >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. In theory (although gawd help anyone who had to put it into practice), the individual members could indeed work through the archives of an entire community, open the posts they created, copy out the content, and then systematically and in order, with the appropriate backdating, recreate those posts at a new iteration on Dreamwidth. And the people who commented on those posts could open each post, look for their comments, copy them onto their clipboard, and then individually paste them into new comments, adding a time/date stamp in the text to indicate when the comment was originally made. I wouldn't place odds on that happening in even the smallest niche communities. 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. | 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. 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. 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. 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. Thanks, Alexis Carpenter principia at Dreamwidth principia_coh at LiveJournal
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