The master conceptual tests at Dreamwidth are, I believe, the Design Personas.

There are a number of other conceptual tests that long-time Dreamwidth (and LiveJournal) code/design/suggestions participants run against proposed features or implementations. I hope to collect some of them here, and maybe start a wiki page at some point, because this is the sort of stuff that's retained in the tribal knowledge pool, and is therefore vulnerable to the problems of human memory and absence.

* Went to Costa Rica with the Peace Corps (prolonged absence, with or without notice).
How does the proposed feature or implementation affect a user who is away from both their account, and any possible notifications, for prolonged times? In particular, any feature that depends on a user responding to a prompt within say a six-month deadline, with irreversible effects that include data loss, is just not on. christine is the old LJ Support test case: she was previously an active volunteer, and planned her long absence beforehand. She periodically returns and updates us all on her life! She's generally away from her journal a year or two at a time, with no means of access in between.

* Deceased (with or without memorial status) user.
How does it affect (the readers/circle of) a user who will never return? The friends/family of a deceased user may or may not choose to ask for memorial status for that account, so assuming that all accounts belonging to deceased users will have been given memorial status is not a safe assumption.

* Dead Manta Problems
How does it interact with deleted-and-purged accounts, particularly ones who have had the old name reactivated by someone having renamed to it? (Named in honor of the once-and-again deadmantalks, whose old name became ex_deadmanta-some-numbers upon reclaiming the name.)

* Unwanted Contact
How could this be used, either by accident or with malice aforethought, to cause communication between parties who should not communicate with each other? Will it need to restrict anonymous or not-logged-in use or respect ban settings?

* Spam
How could this be used by a spammer?

* Scalability
Consider the potential load if the entire population of the site should use it, or if a large number of users were to use the feature at its highest capacity. For example, what if this feature were used by a high-traffic roleplaying game? (This is usually a developer/architect level problem.)

* Paid Features
Is this a feature that requires a lot of expensive operations? Could this be offset by restricting it (or higher levels of it) to paying users? Would extending a higher level of it to paying users be a nice perk for them? (This is ultimately a staff decision.)

* Malice Aforethought
How could this be used to disrupt others' use of the site? Could any of it be avoided by built-in safeguards or rules, rather than moderation after the fact?

* Journal Types
How does this apply to regular users, communities, and identity users? Does it apply to only one journal type, or can it be usefully used by more?

* Settings Overload
More settings are possibly great for power users, but can cause decision fatigue in neophyte to intermediate users who just want things to work. D has a whole essay on this somewhere, I think.

* Opt-In vs. Opt-Out
Opt-out makes features more discoverable (I think D has an essay on this too), which means that the default state of new features should not piss off, injure (migraine or seizure trigger), or endanger (publish or publicize previously private or covert information such as location or wallet name) users who have not yet turned it off.


I'm sure I'm forgetting some stuff, so if there are other things that either are or should be stuff that gets discussed when talking about a new feature, please feel free to add it in the comments, or in the wiki page once someone builds that.

1:31 PM 2/25/2010
I wonder how many people look at my default userpic and identify the wrong person as being me?

1:32 PM 2/25/2010
Going into the city later.

2:20 PM 2/25/2010
Still figuring out the most logical setup for my recycling shenanigans. I'm thinking a blue IKEA bag right in that nook, with 2 paper bags and 1 plastic: 1 for stuff for which I can get deposit, 1 for paper for apartment complex recycle, 1 for plastic for apartment complex recycle.

2:27 PM 2/25/2010
I have R.E.M. in my head again. ORANGE CRUSH.

1:36 AM 2/26/2010
Still giggly over the fact that the closest match to my actual skin tone in the way of the strap-ons offered by Good Vibrations is the Tantus Vamp, which is their pale-ivory-and-sparkling (little gold sparkles, rather than little white or rainbow sparkles, I must specify) selection. I'd seen the thing before, on the internet, and howled at the ad copy. Then I saw the thing hanging from the wall in the shop from a distance, identified it as the closest match to my burns-at-a-hint-of-sun foggy-island-and-extreme-northerner complexion (it's lighter than I am, but only slightly, and has the right undertones; the caucasian-tan selections are a few shades off in the other direction but have the wrong undertones). Then I looked closer and saw the sparkles. A tiny bell dinged in my brain. I looked at the tag (and the price). Yes, it was indeed The Vamp. This resulted in me dying of the giggles, and sharing my thoughts on Twilight with the clerk who popped up.

I did not actually get this item. It is, however, on my wish list. (I'm sure you all needed to know that.)

( In which we regress through Miss Lunatic's day. )

This is cleaned up a little and elaborated upon some from an IRC discussion of what I do in Suggestions. Support, feel free to ask plenty of questions. This is, er, long.

( Comment moderation, suggestions organization, the moderation queue, and administrative! )

What Other People Can Do To Help

Participate! suggestions doesn't generally need too much help getting people involved and engaged, but if you see a lonely-looking suggestion that has no comments, see if there's something you can say about it, whether it's supportive or constructively critical.

Check for implementation! If something has since been implemented and you happen to see it, point that out, including pointing out the FAQ(s) explaining how to use the kickass change, which will prompt me to update the status.

View suggestions in their best possible light. Many suggestions are awesome to start with and need no extra help. Some suggestions need a lot of refining before they would be able to be considered. Rather than responding with an immediate 'no', consider the underlying need that the suggestion demonstrates. Consider the circumstances under which you would be willing to have the suggestion around. Consider whether you would mind having the suggestion implemented if developer time were not a finite resource.

Address the concept, not the person bringing it up, if it's something you don't like. If you know you have a poor history with a particular other commenter, avoid engaging with them if you can.

If you can write the code to make something happen, that would be pretty nifty. That was one of the things that made suggestions great in the old days. It still has to be reviewed, and may not be adopted, but there may well be a better chance if the code's already done.

If you see a tag that should exist, or a tag that does exist that isn't on a particular post but should be, let me know.

For people with Jira access, if there's something that should be in Jira and is, commenting with the bug number would be Helpful. If it should be in there and isn't, if you can add it, commenting with the bug number would be Helpful. (You may also find it useful to cross-link the suggestion from the Jira entry, so when it's implemented it'll be easier to track down the suggestion to mark it implemented.)

In the last 24 hours, I posted the following to Twitter:

• Wednesday, 0047: @metaphorge I like fruitcake, much to the dismay of assorted family.
• Wednesday, 0051: The sun sets over my ocean at midnight. (Gmail, Phantasea theme.)
• Wednesday, 0215: Tasty tasty grapes. Waiting on dryer to spit out warm nightgown. Catching up with reading. A long suggestions day today, also walking dogs.
• Wednesday, 0230: @amyty Every word of those 200 have to be pretty near perfect. There's a little more forgiveness in 1000.
• Wednesday, 1322: @oakandsage http://twitpic.com/w13v - Ooo, pretty!
( read the other 18 )

Follow me on Twitter.

Doing It Right: more useful to say "As written, I don't think I'd be able to work with that, but if you did it like this and like this and like that, then I would be OK with having a feature like that" than "OMG NO I DO NOT WANT THIS IDEA" -- unless there's no way that you could live with it, period.

http://www.sillof.com/C-Steampunk-SW.htm

• 04:57 Example Twitter post by someone using LoudTwitter. #
• 20:23 @semanticist Actually, LJ suggestions! #

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

So a la carte filtering could be used to hack 'only to my friends at post time' filter. Just select all. Hell to edit in new friends though.

Lo, today is full of requests that are not fun. Solution: caffeine. I then plan to work some more when I get home. Two months is long. :(

These are some assumptions that may or may not need re-examining. But I'm running into them as I do things in the comm, both in myself and in others. This is very half-baked, but better for me to have it posted rather than keeping sitting on it in drafts.


Deleting abandoned accounts, and what constitutes account abandonment. I get very strong violent reactions to the mere suggestion of someone deleting an abandoned account because they want the motherfucking username, without the permission of the owner. The absolute only way I could see doing this is making the archive available to the authenticated previous owner, and even then, I'm reluctant. Very reluctant.

Crossposting is necessarily a bad thing. (LJ isn't built to handle it, but if LJ were rebuilt from the ground up, it might not be a bad thing.)

Merging two journals would be REALLY REALLY AWESOME.

There's a really strong feeling that a lot of stuff about people should be public, even though a lot of people want a lot of them private, like the profile, and icons. Why is there this strong feeling that it should always be public? What does it matter to someone who is on the same journaling service?

Oh, and community memberships being public.

For a service that's got whole bags of very nicely granular privacy, there's a very strong user-drive for some of the vital nuts and bolts to be public.

Adult content flagging that doesn't mention "adult content", to avoid tripping stuff.

It doesn't matter if they're not going to interact. It will matter if they do interact, and here is how. (IP address-based blocking. Doesn't work for viewing, but I don't care if they use it for commenting in a personal journal.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkJdEFf_Qg4 -- Baby Got Back.

Let's see. Writers group was fun. Read a very short poem. Dinner featured puns and me attempting to get out of the busboy's way, resulting in me meeting the wall with too much enthusiasm. Work is excellent; need to get my post count up. Work did breakfast this morning -- just Picard, Mr. Out, and me. The rest of the team has taken to calling Kirk and Picard by their nicknames, as when the sup wasn't there, I asked who was the acting lead using the nicknames, and it stuck.

Breakfast was peaceful -- lots of gossip and good humor, but no riots.

One of these days I am going to have the spare time to do a road trip for an LJ party. Today was not one of them.

lacey will be coming at the beginning of June. Have applied for time off.

If someone has ideas, they get sent to suggestions. We take them there, with one or two exceptions: if it's appeared before, or with lengthy digressions. Or with naughty userpics, to make bad impressions.