azurelunatic | Solving social problems with clever application of engineering?

Solving social problems with clever application of engineering?

As of 9 this morning, the thread about LJ features in that entry revealed that

ataniell93 are thinking of LJ use very differently.

rahaeli is thinking of the average user, over near-unthinkably vast numbers of very, very average users, and thinking about usability for a new adopter who hasn't learned LJ and doesn't have someone mentoring them through the learning curve.

ataniell93 is thinking about the usability of the site for a power user managing barely-thinkable numbers of journals at once, and paying for a goodly chunk of them, because at the moment LJ is the best tool for the purpose, and it works very well except for having to reset umpteen billion settings every time there is a change.

My thought process follows.

Just thinking about the main issue of journal-based MMORPGs, I think the actual answer might be something along the lines of creating a new server running the LJ code, with some tweaks to make it work correctly. LJ wasn't strictly designed for RP, and the vast majority of users are in fact single users.

Either that, or a client that supports both a) managing multiple logins/fast switching, and b) will work to make changes to LJ settings (navbar/ads/etc.)

Actually, a client sounds like the best idea. I have my head half-in design space right now, because of dealing with bloody spreadsheets at work, and that sounds like it would be the ideal sort of tool to deal
with the problem of managing vast multiple journals where you'd really like to have a list of all your RP journals, the features that can be managed laid out in columns, and a "select all" tickybox to apply the same change to all the journals at once.

It would of course require updating the client to keep up with the new features added to LJ, but the main problem seems to be "do the same change to umpteen billion journals after I have looked at it and decided I do not care for this thanks", the problems involved in the vast scope of the management of all the journals.

(Now, if only someone with the LJ code background to back this up could tell me if that sounds like it would work...)

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I have a Firefox extension that allows me to switch between journals with a scroll and a single click.

It still takes a couple hours for me to do it for my 100 plus the 75-100 or so that my players gave me the passwords too because they're not power users and they can't find all the little twitchy pages as well as I can.

Being able to have a master password and make the same change for them all at once WOULD be bliss. But

rahaeli pissed me off with the brussels sprouts comment big time. If you're not my mother, you can't laugh at me and tell me you know what's better for me.

When I noticed that the two of you were interacting there, I was fairly sure that it was going to wind up with you two getting on like a house afire, or ... not getting on, in the same fashion. Both of you are Alpha Slytherins, and you've taught me better than to attempt to get the two of you re-introduced now that this first introduction has Not Gone Well.

Actually, this isn't the first time we've interacted, I'm pretty sure sie would show up on my joule graph somewhere. It might go better a second time, but the introduction of any metaphor into a conversation which makes me not just suspect but be certain that the other individual believes themselves to be having a mother-5yo interaction is never, ever, ever going to go down with me, no.

I shall remember that if I ever attempt to make a re-introduction, that site politics should be on the list of topics best left avoided. The lady can write, though. OMG.

Sadly, it probably would have gone better if you'd allowed me to continue thinking of her as a Ravenclaw clueless about power dynamics. That a Slytherin made a comment to me like the brussels sprout comment is something I probably won't forget; we don't often say things like that by accident, and when we do it's an "accidentally let true feelings slip" not an "accidentally didn't have any idea that could be construed as insulting" accident.

As I look at the context, it strikes me that she would feel mother-to-five-year-old -- about the people flaming without forethought or portfolio (and there are a lot of them).

I suspect that she feels rather in the position of liege-lady-to-people for LJ, given her position in the administration. The average complaining person she deals with on a regular basis is generally not being reasonable, and as liege-lady, she would find that Irritating As Fuck. (As I hang out in the Back Room, I Hear Stories. The things that come up in comments to official posts are very sane compared to some of the stuff that comes in via e-mail. She gets to see a disproportionate amount of The Crazy as relates to LJ, and I know I haven't heard even a small fraction of the war stories.)

Someone coming to her one-on-one and airing grievances in a sane/adult fashion is another story. She takes her responsibilities seriously, and anyone who's seriously and rationally aiming to make LJ a good place gets treated with the respect due someone with common goals. It may take her a moment to realize that someone is actually a sane adult, but I'm sure she does think of people accordingly once she recognizes them.

I looked at the comment thread yet again, and the brussels sprouts thing is in direct reply to something

torrilin said about massive end-user cluelessness. As a reply to you, it would be very insulting; as a reply to her, it becomes about the people who do manage to come off like five-year-olds in the change/feedback process. She's always struck me as more careful than to say something like that in the presence of the person or people she's talking about. So while I'm certain that you're absolutely right that she *does* feel that way about some people, I don't think that you're one of the people she feels that way about.

(As an example of one of the people that she, and I, feel that way about, there's a specific user who has publicly declared "I'm Leaving LJ For Good!!" about ten times in the past year. However, she hasn't. She makes a point of trolling up all the

news posts with comments ranging from merely disenchanted dissenting opinion to outright malicious and on into not-so-sane (like Marcus Weasley is not-so-sane). It's gotten to the point where someone who spots her expressing a dissenting but respectful opinion alerts the press, just about, because OMG she's being sane. I suspect that *anyone* who's had to deal with *that* person would not only consider her a five-year-old, but would like to tackle her, get her into a wrestling hold, and ensure that brussels sprouts be eaten. Either that or kick her off LJ for being a public nuisance. I have heard the sarcastic-but-serious offer that since the user is paranoid that if she deletes her account, someone else will rename to it and Do Malicious Things In Her (abandoned) Name, they could always *suspend* her, which would prevent a re-name to that username, if only she'd ask, just to get her *off* the site... )

(Now, *

burr86*, on the other hand, strikes me as Classic Ravenclaw and easily capable of both saying things served with a side of Foot In Mouth and also being so very head-down into LJ that other viewpoints get brushed off in the classic "but this is Important Stuff; of course you need to see it my way, and if I explain it more, of course you will!" fashion. (And then when Explaining It More doesn't actually help, there is the inevitable Ravenclaw reaction.) We love him dearly, but there are times he should perhaps re-think any words of his going out into the general public without having been run through someone first, especially in response to a typical flamebait topic. I don't know Winnie, I just hear her name around.)

Huh, I'll keep that in mind.

It was downthread from one of my posts but not a direct reply to me.

It's still kind of totally unwise to say shit like that, in public. A Slyth should know that, man :D

Burr is totally Classic 'claw and I mind him a lot less than I used to. He had this habit of freezing my threads which pissed me off a lot till he finally explained that he was only interested in *technical* feedback and not what I thought about stuff otherwise.

Winnie was one of the people that Six Apart actually hired and paid so the fact that she was rude just drove me nuts.

That, and he's also I think mid-college-age and will settle down a little more with a couple more years of socialization.

Returning to ideas upthread:

I was discussing this with

littlewings04 and

fighter102 and I think the biggest problem is that when you save a profile you save everything on that page to the profile.

Before LJ started telling you that you were making some sort of user error when you changed logins with the same page up, it used to be possible to accidentally save someone else's profile as your own using LJ login. I once saved Alexandra Ducas' userinfo to Nat Pritchard's profile page. I was very irate but also glad I didn't do it with say, Dracaena and Zsuzsanna, whose profile pages are far more elaborate and information-rich. I was able to hit the back button a few times and screen-scrape Nat's profile, then fill in the rest from a spreadsheet I keep handy.

(I think I need to sit down over the long holiday from work and actually save everyone's user info in a file.)

Anyhow, the risk would be that if you saved one setting to 20 profiles at once, making sure that you didn't make them all the same profile.

Yeah, that would be a risk.

I back up my profile every time I make major changes to it, because that's a lot of stuff I have there.

Ooo, that could be really really not good. I'm glad you were able to recover from it.

Winnie doesn't work for 6A anymore, btw.

Ah, thanks for the update.

The thing is, I really like that LW isn't running on a MUSH or using MMORPG code. I like the fact that we chat, discuss, write journal posts/edit chatroom posts, and have a delay between when we do something and when it becomes real.

In MU** environments, what's done is done, and there's no, "oh fuck, that was stupid"/"omg she would NEVER have done that hello are you on crack back up" button.

That is pretty cool. And it seems like it's a lot easier for bystanders to read, too.

Actually come to think of it, our biggest behaviour problem evar (she of the 2000 socks) was constantly complaining that she liked MU* environments better. Because we were always stopping her and saying, "hey. WTF. That's going to result in really bad shit happening for everyone, are you sure you want to do that?" And she overplayed her characters for laughs, which is the quickest way to get on my bad side as a mod. If I wanted to run a sitcom game I'd have said so.

I can't imagine that overplaying would go over in LW at all well.

There have been a few people who really have or have had to be watched, because their method of dealing with uncomfortable levels of tension is "lighten things up". This is okay if it means making snarky wisecracks and brilliant blackly humourous analogies. It's not okay when it involves requesting permission to play funny talking animals.

Wouldn't funny talking animals be something better-suited for lw_ooc_on_crack? :D

This was in fact my opinion. At the time, however, there was actual wank on lw_ooc about this.

She said she wanted to make a serious attempt to play Aragog as a character. And that she knew a lot about spiders.

But she'd made the journal without asking me and I'd seen it, and she had Aragog hatching and saying, "MaMa?"

Because everybody who really knows about spiders, knows that spiders imprint like baby ducks and are born with a concept of "Mama".

*cracks up* I'd have loved to have read that ... out of the main RP, in the OOC. It doesn't fit with the LW tone, but for LW *crack*, it's beautiful.

She may not have deleted the journal:

acromantula

It's on our ban list which she probably knows because everything we know is hers is banned.

It's not so much that she trolls as that she complains about what we do in the game with "her" characters that were based on HP canon and the backgrounds of which were worked out with me, Niki and Becky, who were deeply intertwined in the lives of all the main characters, and who she expected to just "disappear" when she wasn't actively playing and after she quit, as if they had never, ever, even existed. Like Crisis on Infinite Earths or something. She gets a lot of play on FW about how we STOLE HER OCS OMG.

Actually, a client sounds like the best idea. I have
my head half-in design space right now, because of
dealing with bloody spreadsheets at work, and that
sounds like it would be the ideal sort of tool to deal
with the problem of managing vast multiple journals
where you'd really like to have a list of all your RP
journals, the features that can be managed laid out in
columns, and a "select all" tickybox to apply the same
change to all the journals at once.

It would of course require updating the client to keep
up with the new features added to LJ, but the main
problem seems to be "do the same change to umpteen
billion journals after I have looked at it and decided
I do not care for this thanks", the problems involved
in the vast scope of the management of all the
journals.

(Now, if only someone with the LJ code background to
back this up could tell me if that sounds like it
would work...)

It actually would not be hard to do this with a client--assuming the features involved had a console command. If someone could get LJ to add more userproperties to the set commands, or if they do exist, give a reference to them, it would in fact, be insanely easy to do this with a client, with the XMLRPC console command.

What's more, although the client could be cognizant about some commands and present an easy checklist, it could also have a "run this manually entered command for these journals" part as well, meaning that even if a new feature is introduced (as long as it has a console command to set the property to use), the client would not even need to be updated for people to be able to set the property.

I'm not discounting that the other methods of doing it are possible, but they are much, much cruftier and would be very prone to breaking when LJ did layout changes.

Hmm!

I imagine that petitioning the LJ Powers that Be to put console commands on the New Stuff would be hella more productive than trying to get them to make it all opt-in.

Well, if you find out that it's been accomplished, let me know and I'll probably be able to whip a client up for it, since I've been working on an LJ library written in Java for other projects I'm doing.

I don't think I have the sway for any kind of petition like that, myself.

I left a comment in the news post. Of course, I'm not sure how many of the weird changes would make sane sense with a console command, either.

You can do a lot of them, and the more you can do, the less work the person in question has to do.

Contextual Popups

set contextual_popups 0 //off
set contextual_popups 1 //on

Site Scheme

set sitescheme dystopia
set sitescheme horizon
set sitescheme xcolibur

Nav Strip

set always_see_nav 0 //off
set always_see_nav 1 //on
set always_show_nav 0 //off
set always_show_nav 1 //on
set nav_strip_scheme dark //dark grey nav strip -- these are probably less needed

Video Placeholders

set use_video_placeholders 0 //off
set use_video_placeholders 1 //on

Search Inclusion

set search_inclusion 0 //off
set search_inclusion 1 //on

Gizmo Status

set gizmo_status 0 //off
set gizmo_status 1 //on

Plain Text / Rich Text

set editor_compose last //what was last used
set editor_compose plain // plaintext
set editor_compose rich // rich text

Enabling Comments

set comment_enable everybody
set comment_enable registered
set comment_enable friends

Comment Screening

set comment_screen none
set comment_screen anonymous
set comment_screen notfriends
set comment_screen everyone

IP Logging

set ip_logging 0
set ip_logging 1

Email notifications

set email_notification html
set email_notification plain

Among possible others.

Of course, then the question becomes: does LJ really want to make it easier for these people to create and manage massive amounts of accounts? That I can't know the answer to.

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Solving social problems with clever application of engineering?

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