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RFC: Multiple Account Model
So, one of the things we want to do -- and it's a project that has gotten some developer interest lately -- is make it so that you can associate/link accounts together, so (for instance) you can switch to commenting or posting as your alternate/secondary/fic/RP/whatever journal more easily than logging out and logging back in. We've done some work to spec the problem, but I figured it would be time to toss it out to you guys here and see what other things we've forgotten to think of and what use cases we don't know about yet!
More discussion on the problem can be found at Bug 76. Here are two of the documents that have been written to try to "spec out" the project. Please read them over if you have a chance, and give your feedback.
Draft spec, written by cesy
From one of the manage settings pages, have "manage secondary accounts"
On new manage secondary accounts page, have:
Create a new secondary account - standard flow, but is automatically already connected, and gets created with all the same settings as your primary account
Link an existing account to this one (requires password to the other account)
Unlink one of the secondary accounts from the primary account (has a large and obvious "Are you sure about that?" message)
An option to show/hide links between accounts - can display list of secondary accounts on primary profile, and link to primary profile on secondary profiles
An option to select which account is the primary journal - the primary journal will be default on things like the update page and when commenting
Other pages that will need updating:
Shop - as well as "buy paid time for me" and "buy paid time for another user", need "buy paid time for my secondary account(s)" (which might be discounted)
Edit profile drop-down should list all secondary accounts, as should customize style, manage filters, edit userpics, etc.
Update.bml needs both "post to journal" drop-down (includes all comms and all accounts) and "post as" drop-down (which is disabled if the secondary account can't post to that comm, and defaults to match the journal selected). "Post as" doesn't display unless you have secondary journals.
All comment boxes would need a drop-down to choose who to work as. Ideally this would show normally, not require clicking the "Other"/"More options" button. This should also not display for people who don't have secondary journals.
On options/settings pages, at the bottom, instead of just "Save", have "Save for this journal" and "Save for all journals" (but only if the user has a secondary journal, otherwise leave it as just "Save".)
Other notes:
If someone has given access to any one of your accounts, and you go to their journal, you see the locked entries.
If someone has given access to only one of your accounts, and you subscribe to them from another account, what happens when you look at the reading page of that account? Do you see the locked entries or not?
If you click to subscribe, unsubscribe, grant or remove access or join or leave a community and you get the usual confirmation page, that should include a "Do this as which account?" thing.
The pop-up hover menus should behave as usual for the main account, and ignore secondary accounts.
Can secondary accounts have different email addresses?
Creating a secondary account should require an invite code?
Have a careful think about transferring a secondary account from one primary account to another.
Further considerations, written by tyggerjai
Goal: To streamline management of multiple journals and journal features for a single user account. Mostly involving addition of “Manage accounts” interface, but with implications for ban settings, reading pages, and access lists.
Background:
[A note on terminology: Part of the current issue is that there is a conflation of a “journal” with an “account”. An “account” represents a human being, but it has become obvious that many DW users want and have multiple journals. This entire project stems from the fact that accounts and journals, while historically identical, are de facto different things. Discussion of which things are “account” based (login, killfiles, subscription, access to someone else's journal) and which things are “journal” based (tags, entries, access to read one of my journals) are probably beyond scope for this bug (although see “Potential problems” at the end). I shall use the term “journal” in this document unless I wish to make a point about the distinction, because at the moment, journal is the paradigm we have to work with.]
Annabel has a Dreamwidth journal – dw_annabel – which she started when she first found Dreamwidth. It has mostly personal updates about her life, but she doesn't talk about her work. Mostly because her mother reads the dw_annabel journal, and rather than maintain access lists, or risk having her mother find out what she actually does for a living, Annabel maintains another journal for her work stories – work_annabel. Recently, Annabel has discovered the joy of writing speculative fiction, so she has started another journal, fic_annabel, for working on a novel. She's co-writing it with her friend Boris, so Boris also has the password for that journal. Annabel is growing increasingly weary of constantly logging in and out to post on various journals, and she would like the following:
1)When she is logged in as “dw_annabel”, which she considers her “primary” account, she'd like to be able to manage all her journals from the management interface. Everything she can do to dw_annabel (style, circle management, privacy management, etc), she wants to do from one central screen as dw_annabel. It'd even be nice if she could choose to apply to things like screenings to all her journals at once, although she'd need to be able to change settings per-journal as well.
2)She'd like to be able to subscribe to some other journals via her personal journal, and some via her work journal (so that her mother never knows about them!). But she'd like to read them on the same page – one central reading page. She'd still like to be able to filter, though – for her fiction, sometimes she just wants to read fic_annabel's reading page.
3)Similarly, when she's reading as dw_annabel, she would like to read any post that has given access to her work_annabel or fic_annabel journals.
4)She'd like a link to the fic_annabel journal to show up on the profile for dw_annabel, and vice versa, as being her journals. But under no circumstances should her mother be able to discover a connection between dw_annabel and work_annabel!
5)Recently, she had someone making unpleasant comments in fic_annabel, and has banned them. She'd like that ban to be applied across all her journals – fic_annabel, dw_annabel and work_annabel. Just in case. But she'd also like to be able to revoke that ban just on fic_annabel, in case it turns out she's banned Boris.
6)When she goes to make a post she definitely needs to be able to choose which journal to post to. When she goes to leave a comment in she needs to be able to choose whether it shows up as a post from dw_annabel, fic_annabel, or annabel_work. She doesn't want to “log in” as fic_annabel – fic_annabel isn't a person, and she can do everything she needs to do to manage the fic_annabel journal as dw_annabel.
7)She can see a day, possibly soon, when she will grow weary of the fic_annabel story. She'd like to know that when the time comes, she can hand it off to Boris and untangle herself from it.
8)When she does that, she'll probably want to start another journal for her own fiction. She should be able to do that as dw_annabel, give it a new name, and start using it, without ever having to log in, log out, or otherwise manually tell the DW system that she owns it.
That's about all Annabel wants to do, really....
Skillsets: Everything and then some. This is backend, frontend, graphical, UX, business, scalability, and some things I haven't thought of yet.
Requirements:
[Another note on terminology. “Link” is somewhat overloaded here, since it can refer either to a managerial connection between to accounts, or a visible “a href=” on a profile page. I'll reserve “link” for the visible connection, and use “associate” for the higher level managerial connection.]
1)The project MUST provide a method of associating journals, with a single signon to edit and maintain them. Whether we call it “primary/secondary”, or “one account, many journals”, the heart of this project is the ability to log in as dw_annabel and modify fic_annabel and work_annabel. That has two components:
a) Migration of existing journals. It MUST be possible for a user with multiple journals to declare one of them a “primary” journal, and associate other existing journals with it.
b) Creation of future journals. It SHOULD be possible, once this project is implemented, to create journals with automatic association to an existing primary. (NB. This is a should because migration is a must, and if we have that, users can create and then migrate. Realistically, though, it's a “really should”.)
2)The project MUST provide a method for managing linked journals from a single central interface. This interface MUST replicate the current management functionality for each associated journal without requiring log out/log in for that journal account, if the user is logged in with their primary account credentials. This interface SHOULD provide the ability to apply changes to multiple journals at once, but if it does so, it MUST retain the ability to override settings on a per-journal basis.
3)The project SHOULD provide a single central reading page for the primary account, which will incorporate all journals to which all associated journals are subscribed. Such an interface SHOULD include locked posts to which any associated journal has access. However, if such an interface is present, it MUST be possible to filter that reading page on a per journal basis (i.e., if a user should be able to remove a given journals subscriptions from that central page). The project MUST maintain individual journal reading lists [that's more for backwards compatibility and privacy – I can currently go to work_annabel and see that reading list. It shouldn't suddenly show me dw_annabel's reading list.]
4)The project SHOULD allow a user to declare associations between journals as “Public” or “Private”. For “Public” associations, links SHOULD be shown on the profile pages of associated journals. Whether this is implemented or not, the project MUST NOT allow other users to see evidence of association between journals UNLESS the owner has explicitly declared the association public.
5)The project SHOULD allow a user to implement bans that apply to all associated journals. If implemented, this feature MUST allow a user to then rescind any given ban on any individual journal.
6)The project SHOULD implement the ability to easily select a journal to post TO when updating. The project SHOULD implement the ability to easily choose a journal to past AS when commenting on a journal. [Note: These are only shoulds because we will almost certainly retain the account/journal conflation, and therefore in theory it's possible to log out and in again. I think the focus of this bug is really the management, and this posting interface is gravy, but it's important gravy]. If implemented, the commenting interface SHOULD restrict the choice to journal identities with commenting privileges, and MUST NOT allow journal identities to comment when they are not privileged to do so. That is, if journal annabels_friend has restricted commenting access, and allows comments only from dw_annabel, the interface MUST NOT allow annabel to comment as fic_annabel or work_annabel.
7)The project SHOULD implement a mechanism for removing an associated journal. Once removed, a journal will behave like any other non-associated journal.
8)The project MAY implement the ability to “sub-associate” journals with other users. That is, while ultimate control of the account rests with the creator, they can grant other users the ability to post to the journal, or post as the journal identity, change settings, etc, without giving the other user password access. The other user MUST NOT inherit access to posts that the journal identity has been granted. (i.e., Annabel gives Boris post and edit privs to fic_annabel. Boris's reading list still does not contain items from fic_annabel's subscriptions, nor can he see items to which fic_annabel has been granted. He can, however, post as fic_annabel ). See “Potential problems” :)
Potential Problems: Where do I start? On the bright side, I think most of our problems are social rather than technical.
1)Migrating accounts. I included the shared account with Boris for a reason. Let's say we're as restrictive as possible, and the following is required to migrate an account:
a) You must have access to both email addresses, to reply to “confirm” emails. You must know the password for both accounts.
Ok. But Boris has the password, and the email address for that account is a shared one. So even once Annabel has migrated, Boris can just remigrate it. This is a problem with the existing paradigm – because journals and accounts are the same, passwords are the only control mechanism. There's no way of knowing Annabel created the account. I think that for the moment we put this in the “too hard” basket, and say “Social problem, sort it out yourselves”. We lock it down so you can only migrate an account if you have both passwords, and can respond to emails sent to both accounts. There's really not much else we can do. ( as an aside, this is the classic example of why the “single account, multiple journals” is a better long-term paradigm, but this is almost a de facto implementation of that). After a journal has been migrated, do we have a complaints resolution process for Boris to say “Hey, she stole my journal”? I don't know that we need one – what's our current procedure for people sharing passwords and then one of them changing it to lock someone else out?
2)To be honest, everything else just looks like hard work. We really, really have to make sure that the commenting interface enforces identity restriction. If you have a locked post that tyggerjai can comment on, we DO NOT let tyggerdev comment on it, even though they're the same “person”. That's the ultimate UX nono, as far as I can see.
3)Oh. Sub-association. That's down the end as a “may” because although it's a huge, huge advantage that the “Association” paradigm has over the password paradigm, it's the biggest can of worms. It's almost a whole other specification on its own. But the main points, I think, are there. Give Boris edit/post access, but restrict privacy inheritance to the original owner. There's one massive thing preventing the implementation of subassociation, though, and that's what happens if Annabel then removes her association with fic_annabel. Does Boris then inherit the access as the new owner? Does dw_annabel keep the access, and if so, with which journal do we associate it? None of this is worse than our existing paradigm with passwords – in fact, it's a lot better, because if we do need to, we can suspend fic_annabel's access to everything, send emails out to people who have given fic_annabel access saying “This journal is changing owner! If you know the new owner and you're cool with it, click here to retain their access rights. If you don't know the new owner, click here to send an email to the old owner, so they can get in touch with you to arrange new access. Or, if this is freaking you out, click here to revoke the journal's access to your journal for good.”. But this is exactly the kind of thing that makes users nervous, and that we have to have a plan for. So at the moment, it's an itty bitty “may”, and if users want to hand a journal over to someone else, they can disassociate, give the new owner the email, and move on from there. But I think we may still need to handle the access notification in that case, simply because by implementing association, we give the impression that we're moving from “Anyone could have the password to this journal so be careful” to “No, your friend owns this journal, it's fine! “
4)Actually, all of that, again, regardless of subassociation: by implementing association, we give the impression that we're moving from “Anyone could have the password to this journal so be careful” to “No, your friend owns this journal, it's fine!”. Which, of course, we're not – journals will still have passwords, and other people may still know them. We could go all the way, and break the map between journals and accounts once and for all, so journals don't have passwords, but that's a much bigger project, I think.
5)Preselecting identities to comment as based on a post's access rules is going to suck. Just saying :)
Anyway. This section should probably be much longer, but I've left it as an Exercise For The Reader, since you know your community better than I do at the moment. I think the biggest problems are social – that associating journals with users sets up an interesting disconnect – if I give tyggerdev access because I've read it and I'm interested in the dev stuff, then if the owner of tyggerdev decides he's sick of coding, but gives the journal to someone else, I don't really care. I had no investment in the person. On the other hand, maybe I did – maybe I gave tyggerdev access to my journal because I know the owner. So then when he gives it away, I'm shattered! I don't know this person! What's going on!? Again, it's no worse than the existing password-sharing shenanigans in terms of actual security, only in terms of perception. And it's only a problem ever if we let people give journals away.
So! What thoughts does this inspire in you?
More discussion on the problem can be found at Bug 76. Here are two of the documents that have been written to try to "spec out" the project. Please read them over if you have a chance, and give your feedback.
Draft spec, written by cesy
From one of the manage settings pages, have "manage secondary accounts"
On new manage secondary accounts page, have:
Create a new secondary account - standard flow, but is automatically already connected, and gets created with all the same settings as your primary account
Link an existing account to this one (requires password to the other account)
Unlink one of the secondary accounts from the primary account (has a large and obvious "Are you sure about that?" message)
An option to show/hide links between accounts - can display list of secondary accounts on primary profile, and link to primary profile on secondary profiles
An option to select which account is the primary journal - the primary journal will be default on things like the update page and when commenting
Other pages that will need updating:
Shop - as well as "buy paid time for me" and "buy paid time for another user", need "buy paid time for my secondary account(s)" (which might be discounted)
Edit profile drop-down should list all secondary accounts, as should customize style, manage filters, edit userpics, etc.
Update.bml needs both "post to journal" drop-down (includes all comms and all accounts) and "post as" drop-down (which is disabled if the secondary account can't post to that comm, and defaults to match the journal selected). "Post as" doesn't display unless you have secondary journals.
All comment boxes would need a drop-down to choose who to work as. Ideally this would show normally, not require clicking the "Other"/"More options" button. This should also not display for people who don't have secondary journals.
On options/settings pages, at the bottom, instead of just "Save", have "Save for this journal" and "Save for all journals" (but only if the user has a secondary journal, otherwise leave it as just "Save".)
Other notes:
If someone has given access to any one of your accounts, and you go to their journal, you see the locked entries.
If someone has given access to only one of your accounts, and you subscribe to them from another account, what happens when you look at the reading page of that account? Do you see the locked entries or not?
If you click to subscribe, unsubscribe, grant or remove access or join or leave a community and you get the usual confirmation page, that should include a "Do this as which account?" thing.
The pop-up hover menus should behave as usual for the main account, and ignore secondary accounts.
Can secondary accounts have different email addresses?
Creating a secondary account should require an invite code?
Have a careful think about transferring a secondary account from one primary account to another.
Further considerations, written by tyggerjai
Goal: To streamline management of multiple journals and journal features for a single user account. Mostly involving addition of “Manage accounts” interface, but with implications for ban settings, reading pages, and access lists.
Background:
[A note on terminology: Part of the current issue is that there is a conflation of a “journal” with an “account”. An “account” represents a human being, but it has become obvious that many DW users want and have multiple journals. This entire project stems from the fact that accounts and journals, while historically identical, are de facto different things. Discussion of which things are “account” based (login, killfiles, subscription, access to someone else's journal) and which things are “journal” based (tags, entries, access to read one of my journals) are probably beyond scope for this bug (although see “Potential problems” at the end). I shall use the term “journal” in this document unless I wish to make a point about the distinction, because at the moment, journal is the paradigm we have to work with.]
Annabel has a Dreamwidth journal – dw_annabel – which she started when she first found Dreamwidth. It has mostly personal updates about her life, but she doesn't talk about her work. Mostly because her mother reads the dw_annabel journal, and rather than maintain access lists, or risk having her mother find out what she actually does for a living, Annabel maintains another journal for her work stories – work_annabel. Recently, Annabel has discovered the joy of writing speculative fiction, so she has started another journal, fic_annabel, for working on a novel. She's co-writing it with her friend Boris, so Boris also has the password for that journal. Annabel is growing increasingly weary of constantly logging in and out to post on various journals, and she would like the following:
1)When she is logged in as “dw_annabel”, which she considers her “primary” account, she'd like to be able to manage all her journals from the management interface. Everything she can do to dw_annabel (style, circle management, privacy management, etc), she wants to do from one central screen as dw_annabel. It'd even be nice if she could choose to apply to things like screenings to all her journals at once, although she'd need to be able to change settings per-journal as well.
2)She'd like to be able to subscribe to some other journals via her personal journal, and some via her work journal (so that her mother never knows about them!). But she'd like to read them on the same page – one central reading page. She'd still like to be able to filter, though – for her fiction, sometimes she just wants to read fic_annabel's reading page.
3)Similarly, when she's reading as dw_annabel, she would like to read any post that has given access to her work_annabel or fic_annabel journals.
4)She'd like a link to the fic_annabel journal to show up on the profile for dw_annabel, and vice versa, as being her journals. But under no circumstances should her mother be able to discover a connection between dw_annabel and work_annabel!
5)Recently, she had someone making unpleasant comments in fic_annabel, and has banned them. She'd like that ban to be applied across all her journals – fic_annabel, dw_annabel and work_annabel. Just in case. But she'd also like to be able to revoke that ban just on fic_annabel, in case it turns out she's banned Boris.
6)When she goes to make a post she definitely needs to be able to choose which journal to post to. When she goes to leave a comment in she needs to be able to choose whether it shows up as a post from dw_annabel, fic_annabel, or annabel_work. She doesn't want to “log in” as fic_annabel – fic_annabel isn't a person, and she can do everything she needs to do to manage the fic_annabel journal as dw_annabel.
7)She can see a day, possibly soon, when she will grow weary of the fic_annabel story. She'd like to know that when the time comes, she can hand it off to Boris and untangle herself from it.
8)When she does that, she'll probably want to start another journal for her own fiction. She should be able to do that as dw_annabel, give it a new name, and start using it, without ever having to log in, log out, or otherwise manually tell the DW system that she owns it.
That's about all Annabel wants to do, really....
Skillsets: Everything and then some. This is backend, frontend, graphical, UX, business, scalability, and some things I haven't thought of yet.
Requirements:
[Another note on terminology. “Link” is somewhat overloaded here, since it can refer either to a managerial connection between to accounts, or a visible “a href=” on a profile page. I'll reserve “link” for the visible connection, and use “associate” for the higher level managerial connection.]
1)The project MUST provide a method of associating journals, with a single signon to edit and maintain them. Whether we call it “primary/secondary”, or “one account, many journals”, the heart of this project is the ability to log in as dw_annabel and modify fic_annabel and work_annabel. That has two components:
a) Migration of existing journals. It MUST be possible for a user with multiple journals to declare one of them a “primary” journal, and associate other existing journals with it.
b) Creation of future journals. It SHOULD be possible, once this project is implemented, to create journals with automatic association to an existing primary. (NB. This is a should because migration is a must, and if we have that, users can create and then migrate. Realistically, though, it's a “really should”.)
2)The project MUST provide a method for managing linked journals from a single central interface. This interface MUST replicate the current management functionality for each associated journal without requiring log out/log in for that journal account, if the user is logged in with their primary account credentials. This interface SHOULD provide the ability to apply changes to multiple journals at once, but if it does so, it MUST retain the ability to override settings on a per-journal basis.
3)The project SHOULD provide a single central reading page for the primary account, which will incorporate all journals to which all associated journals are subscribed. Such an interface SHOULD include locked posts to which any associated journal has access. However, if such an interface is present, it MUST be possible to filter that reading page on a per journal basis (i.e., if a user should be able to remove a given journals subscriptions from that central page). The project MUST maintain individual journal reading lists [that's more for backwards compatibility and privacy – I can currently go to work_annabel and see that reading list. It shouldn't suddenly show me dw_annabel's reading list.]
4)The project SHOULD allow a user to declare associations between journals as “Public” or “Private”. For “Public” associations, links SHOULD be shown on the profile pages of associated journals. Whether this is implemented or not, the project MUST NOT allow other users to see evidence of association between journals UNLESS the owner has explicitly declared the association public.
5)The project SHOULD allow a user to implement bans that apply to all associated journals. If implemented, this feature MUST allow a user to then rescind any given ban on any individual journal.
6)The project SHOULD implement the ability to easily select a journal to post TO when updating. The project SHOULD implement the ability to easily choose a journal to past AS when commenting on a journal. [Note: These are only shoulds because we will almost certainly retain the account/journal conflation, and therefore in theory it's possible to log out and in again. I think the focus of this bug is really the management, and this posting interface is gravy, but it's important gravy]. If implemented, the commenting interface SHOULD restrict the choice to journal identities with commenting privileges, and MUST NOT allow journal identities to comment when they are not privileged to do so. That is, if journal annabels_friend has restricted commenting access, and allows comments only from dw_annabel, the interface MUST NOT allow annabel to comment as fic_annabel or work_annabel.
7)The project SHOULD implement a mechanism for removing an associated journal. Once removed, a journal will behave like any other non-associated journal.
8)The project MAY implement the ability to “sub-associate” journals with other users. That is, while ultimate control of the account rests with the creator, they can grant other users the ability to post to the journal, or post as the journal identity, change settings, etc, without giving the other user password access. The other user MUST NOT inherit access to posts that the journal identity has been granted. (i.e., Annabel gives Boris post and edit privs to fic_annabel. Boris's reading list still does not contain items from fic_annabel's subscriptions, nor can he see items to which fic_annabel has been granted. He can, however, post as fic_annabel ). See “Potential problems” :)
Potential Problems: Where do I start? On the bright side, I think most of our problems are social rather than technical.
1)Migrating accounts. I included the shared account with Boris for a reason. Let's say we're as restrictive as possible, and the following is required to migrate an account:
a) You must have access to both email addresses, to reply to “confirm” emails. You must know the password for both accounts.
Ok. But Boris has the password, and the email address for that account is a shared one. So even once Annabel has migrated, Boris can just remigrate it. This is a problem with the existing paradigm – because journals and accounts are the same, passwords are the only control mechanism. There's no way of knowing Annabel created the account. I think that for the moment we put this in the “too hard” basket, and say “Social problem, sort it out yourselves”. We lock it down so you can only migrate an account if you have both passwords, and can respond to emails sent to both accounts. There's really not much else we can do. ( as an aside, this is the classic example of why the “single account, multiple journals” is a better long-term paradigm, but this is almost a de facto implementation of that). After a journal has been migrated, do we have a complaints resolution process for Boris to say “Hey, she stole my journal”? I don't know that we need one – what's our current procedure for people sharing passwords and then one of them changing it to lock someone else out?
2)To be honest, everything else just looks like hard work. We really, really have to make sure that the commenting interface enforces identity restriction. If you have a locked post that tyggerjai can comment on, we DO NOT let tyggerdev comment on it, even though they're the same “person”. That's the ultimate UX nono, as far as I can see.
3)Oh. Sub-association. That's down the end as a “may” because although it's a huge, huge advantage that the “Association” paradigm has over the password paradigm, it's the biggest can of worms. It's almost a whole other specification on its own. But the main points, I think, are there. Give Boris edit/post access, but restrict privacy inheritance to the original owner. There's one massive thing preventing the implementation of subassociation, though, and that's what happens if Annabel then removes her association with fic_annabel. Does Boris then inherit the access as the new owner? Does dw_annabel keep the access, and if so, with which journal do we associate it? None of this is worse than our existing paradigm with passwords – in fact, it's a lot better, because if we do need to, we can suspend fic_annabel's access to everything, send emails out to people who have given fic_annabel access saying “This journal is changing owner! If you know the new owner and you're cool with it, click here to retain their access rights. If you don't know the new owner, click here to send an email to the old owner, so they can get in touch with you to arrange new access. Or, if this is freaking you out, click here to revoke the journal's access to your journal for good.”. But this is exactly the kind of thing that makes users nervous, and that we have to have a plan for. So at the moment, it's an itty bitty “may”, and if users want to hand a journal over to someone else, they can disassociate, give the new owner the email, and move on from there. But I think we may still need to handle the access notification in that case, simply because by implementing association, we give the impression that we're moving from “Anyone could have the password to this journal so be careful” to “No, your friend owns this journal, it's fine! “
4)Actually, all of that, again, regardless of subassociation: by implementing association, we give the impression that we're moving from “Anyone could have the password to this journal so be careful” to “No, your friend owns this journal, it's fine!”. Which, of course, we're not – journals will still have passwords, and other people may still know them. We could go all the way, and break the map between journals and accounts once and for all, so journals don't have passwords, but that's a much bigger project, I think.
5)Preselecting identities to comment as based on a post's access rules is going to suck. Just saying :)
Anyway. This section should probably be much longer, but I've left it as an Exercise For The Reader, since you know your community better than I do at the moment. I think the biggest problems are social – that associating journals with users sets up an interesting disconnect – if I give tyggerdev access because I've read it and I'm interested in the dev stuff, then if the owner of tyggerdev decides he's sick of coding, but gives the journal to someone else, I don't really care. I had no investment in the person. On the other hand, maybe I did – maybe I gave tyggerdev access to my journal because I know the owner. So then when he gives it away, I'm shattered! I don't know this person! What's going on!? Again, it's no worse than the existing password-sharing shenanigans in terms of actual security, only in terms of perception. And it's only a problem ever if we let people give journals away.
So! What thoughts does this inspire in you?
no subject
Ooh. Good question. Hadn't thought about it, will do so.
What if Annabelle uploads her icons to the wrong account?
Icon management is something we're still talking about. The joy of the central model is that it actually allows for a step further than that - if your *Account* has X icons, why would we care which *journal* uses them? So they could be available centrally to all your journals. But that's a way down the track, if we go that way at all. In the short term, she may have to delete and re-upload, but I would consider tagging as like any other admin function - the "primary" can tag any secondary icons.
[I]f it's a shared secondary journal, are we going to see whose primary posted?
Man, that shared journal thing does get complex, doesn't it? In theory, the model allows for exactly that kind of tracking in a way that the shared-password model doesn't. In practice, that certainly wouldn't be publicly visible info unless the journal admins made it so.
Would there be maximums set on (primary and or secondary) journal links?
At the moment, the obvious limit is that they all need invite codes. Beyond that, not something I'd thought about.
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Option 1. Everytime you associate an unpaid journal to a primary paid journal, you get 15 extra icons -- effectively giving everyone unlimited icons. Obviously, that's not tenable.
Option 2. If I have 75 (or 250) fannish icons for use at my primary journal, and I want fifteen icons which have pictures of me in them for use at my legal persona's journal, I have to delete 15 of my fannish icons, so that my primary journal only has 60 effective icon slots. I don't like that either.
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Option 2 is more clearly untenable to me, yes. If the paid account icon allowance is 75 and the unpaid is 15, then someone with one of each type should have 90 icon slots, however we handle it.
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Hee. I don't know what it says about me that it occurred to me so immediately--but I figured if it occurred to me it would occur to others, so it'd be best to have it come up before implementation. . . .
Possible solution against this?
To give an example:
I have a seed journal, me_private, as my primary, and two other free journals, me_fic and me_public. Which brings me to a total of 280 icons possible at the max. If icons are shared between multiple journals, this numbers drop accordingly.
I love my starcat icon, and want to share it between me_private and me_fic:
I upload one icon, and can use the same icon in two of my journals but not in me_private.
Some time later, I have 42 icons in my account, 15 of which are used in me_public: 4 are shared with me_private and 2 across all my accounts. me_private and me_public share 3 other icons. me_fic has an aditional 5 icons and the remainder belong to me_private.
So, at the account level we have:
(2+2+2) icons used across all journals (6 slots, 2 icons)
+ (4+4) + (3+3) icons shared across two journals (14 slots, 7 icons)
+ (9) + (5) + (19) icons used in only one journal (33 slots, 33 icons)
= 53 slots used, 42 icons uploaded => max uploadable icons: 227 icons;
On the journal level:
me_public: 15 icons, maxed out
me_fic: 7 icons, can have more icons.
me_private: 25 icons, can have more icons.
I think this model effectively blocks people from cheating the system?
Re: Possible solution against this?
Re: Possible solution against this?
What I meant is each icon use counts against the journal's in which it is in use. if you max the account limit you cannot add more icon for that icon.
If you share 15 icons between your primary and a free secondary, the 15 icons count for both limits. Effectively if both accounts are free accounts, you have 15 icons, not 30 (you still could have 30 if the icons were restricted to one journal, but that's already the case).
If the primary is paid, and you share all icons between primary and secondaries you wont be able to share the 6th journal icon slots unless you free them, just as we do now when we max out our limit.
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It'd effectively be a la carte userpics, but since you'd have to pay for all the other paid features as well to get the icons hopefully that would be enough to support the site.
I can still imagine avenues of abuse, though; different users might be tempted to associate their journals with each other simply to gain access to each other's icons. Imagine if all of DW associated their journals with each other in order to achieve one massive communal pool of icons! (Okay, enough people have security concerns that that would never happen. But it could happen with some smaller subset.)
But then, I don't think I'm as sold on the overall concept. Right now someone might well pay for two paid journals just to keep the same set of 75 icons on two different journals. My attitude is sorta why give it to them for free if they'd be willing to pay for it (although admittedly going by what hypothetical people might be willing to do isn't all that useful) while you'd say they deserve to have to only have to pay for the one journal.
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Oh I LOVE Y'ALL!!!!! I mean, seriously, I love you SO MUCH for aiming y'all's thoughts that way, I don't care what it would cost to be able to have the icons on my various journals where I can GET TO THEM from any journal, I'd pay it!
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But consider me hopping up and down with pom-poms in favor of some version of the above.
I'm sure whatever you come up with to deal with it will be awesome, I just happen to really like that one.
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Hmmm, but I look at people's icon pages all the time and I'm sure others do too, so would icons still be primarily associated with one account, which they would only show up on the icon page of? Or would every linked journal's icon page show the big pool? Could it be optional? And if the association is private, not public, would the icons be kept separate (at least by default)? Because another thing is, if I'm posting as 'sekritidentity,' and all my icons from everywhere are on the menu, I might accidentally pick one that was only to be used as 'othersekritidentity' and then people would know. ;D And if icons from one account are shown on the icon page of another account, likewise, people will ~know~ omg. (Potentially. Which is sufficient.)
So maybe only the publicly linked identities' icons could be added to a big pool, or one could pick which ones or something? (If this idea were to be used.) And if one could pick which journals shared icons, that would be nice for, say, two rp journals that you have who are the same character on different games. None of your other journals need those icons and vice versa, but it would be really handy not to have to upload them twice and have the combined number of slots for different expressions or whatever. (I'm not sure if they have a specific term for this *g* I don't actually rp, just followed The Leaky for a while once upon a time.)
Which makes me think of something else -- what if you do have these two other journals that you want associated with each other publicly, but you still don't want your primary journal to be publicly associated with either one? Can you do that?
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Say every member that wants to in an RP community theworld has access to citizensoftheworld, a non-player character or NPC account. NPCS are used for characters that aren't important enough to merit an application or are world specific. Say Annabelle is a player of theworld, and so her her friends, Boris, Cathy, and Dan, each playing as different player characters who have access to the citizensoftheworld account from wherever they choose to hook up their accounts? And the account is basic and has icons that related to each of the 10 villagers and the 5 village cats, totalling 15. Now say Boris wants to upload kitten icons to citizensoftheworld, because the cats just had kittens in what is a fairly standard thing to cats (who doesn't love kittens!) but finds the NPC account is full of icons, but some of the other journals associated with the account have spaces left open on them. He also has space left for icons on his personal secondary account that he uses to post his daily photos, called boris_picspams.
What would be the error he'd get? Would he be told that he has space for icons in his boris_picspams account? Would he be told about the space on the other journals?
...i would also really like it in this shared icon scenario that there would be a option to have the icons displayed by journal first, then keyword. Thinking ahead some more, anyway. Or maybe choosing which accounts I want to be displayed by default in my icon keywords list (because oh man, I can just see three accounts worth of paid getting quite...lengthy... to scroll through.)
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As much as I could see this being awesome, I can see it having some serious issues. I only have two DW journals; all of my RPs are entrenched on LJ and not going anywhere.
But I have RP icons tagged with fairly generic descriptors that may exactly overlap, or may just be way too similar. If I'm picking "smile" I want to be sure I'm getting the right character's smile, else it's nigh useless. And the menu is long enough as-is; if I had all of my journals on there I don't even want to think about how many icons that is.