Monica

My friend grouchyoldcoot is a relatively new user of LJ (but has been around the net for a long time), so he asked me about the etiquette norms. LJ itself doesn't seem to have any beyond the guidelines for indecent material, so I thought I'd start a discussion here. Related topics often come up in blog_sociology too.

(Let me get this out of the way early: the word "friends" is very wrong in this context. Personally, I think of it more like a "subscriber" model. But I will use the word "friend" here, because that's the LJ lingo.)

LJ is big. Really really big. Over 5 million users, half active, or there-abouts. The vast majority of them are teenagers, and their norms probably differ from those of my circle of friends. I haven't been a teenager for a very long time, and to the best of my knowledge none of my LJ friends are teenagers. These are my opinions; YMMV, especially if your demographic varies.

Adding friends: Some people like to be asked before you add them; others don't care. The user info might contain a hint. I generally do not ask; I figure that if they put it out there for the public to read, there's no difference between reading discreetly and subscribing explicitly. If I see that the person has a very small friends list, I am more likely to post a comment fairly promptly upon subscribing.

Introductory comments: Some people like new subscribers to pop in and say hi explicitly; others don't care. I personally do not leave comments that consist entirely of "hi, I added you"; that sounds kind of high-schoolish to me. The first time I post something of substance, though, I'll often add something like "by the way, I found you via so-and-so".

Recipricocity: Some people expect you to add them back if they add you; others don't care. My advice is to not get into the game of keeping score; add the people you want to read and/or the people you want to give access to your restricted posts. While I don't automatically reciprocate, and it might be for reasons ranging from general content to grammar/format/spelling to the number of posts per day to a high concentration of quizzes to, in one past case, not speaking the language the journal is written in, I do periodically pop into the journals of the people I didn't add back. Journals and posters change over time, after all, and I may subscribe later. Or I may just pop in once every couple weeks, catch up, and maybe leave some comments. Usually it's just about managing my reading list and is not at all personal; there are only so many hours in a day. :-)

Quizzes: Mistakingly called "memes", these are the entries along the lines of "what LotR character are you" or "what color eggplant are you" or whatever. They usually have a graphic (sometimes large) and boilerplate text, with no original content. There are gazillions of them out there. Personally, I dislike them and appreciate it when my friends put them behind lj-cut tags, especially if they're doing a bunch in one fell swoop.

Other "memes": there are lots of things called memes floating around. My recent interview entries are part of one of them. There are also surveys floating around, and some others. I personally like the ones that involve original content, that tell me something about the person posting them. I really like the interview meme because not only does it tell us something about you but it encourages interaction. I think that's kind of neat. Yeah, it's a journal and not a bulletin board, but if you didn't want some level of interaction with your readers you'd just keep a private journal on your home computer, right?

Long posts: there is a convention that long posts should be partially or entirely behind an lj-cut tag so that people don't face excessive scrolling when reading their friends' pages. The definition of "long" varies. You'll get a feel for the local definition among your own friends just by hanging around. There's also a convention of putting large pictures, which consume a lot of bandwidth, behind a cut, particularly if you're posting more than one.

Ok, what basic ("101") topics have I missed, and what do the rest of you think about these?

Random LJ errata:

Several of my friends are being bitten by an apparent bug in posting by email that overwrites your most recent entry instead of making a new one. I haven't posted by email in a while, and given that am not motivated to experiment, but if you do, beware.

Sometimes the time stamps in new posts are in Pacific time rather than local time; sometimes they aren't. Maybe it depends which server you hit or something. There are lots of bug reports about this.

After a bug that screwed up some existing memories (and yeah, like I'm thrilled about having to re-add 400+ memories to recover from the bug...), there are now some other screwy problems with memories. Oh, and if you edit a memory it shows up at the end of your list, so the "sort by order added" view is really "sort by order last edited", which is less useful. When I'm not being bitten by screwy behavior, I'm just editing all of mine to start with the date of the entry, which is close enough to "order added" over the long term. Then I can sort by description and not have to care about wacky ordering.

In response to an LJ support request, I was directed to the suggestions community. Once there, I followed all the instructions, including reviewing the community memories and recent entries to make sure my suggestion wasn't a duplicate. Then I submitted a suggestion to the moderated community, filling out their detailed form completely.

Six days later, I received a rejection whose entire content was "This was already rejected by staff when it was proposed before." No hints about what the issues were or where I might have divined the fact that this was a repeat suggestion. (And, well, I do think it was a reasonable suggestion, or I wouldn't have submitted it.)

This does not motivate me to try in the future. I wonder if that was the goal.

And here's the other one. I love Debbie's art!

( who's been commenting most in my journal )

Oddly, this script didn't work under Mozilla 1.0 (browser hang) or IE 6.0 (404) earlier, but it worked ok for me under Mozilla 1.6 now. I wonder what that was about.

Does anyone know a way to cause the default LJ comment view to display all the comments, rather than collapsing threads when you get to 50 comments? Ideal would be something like the global &style=mine setting, which you only have to set once, but taking one extra step (URL modification?) to expand all threads would be fine too. Also close to ideal would be a way to just bump up the threshold so you could say "hey, I'm on broadband; kick it up from 50 to 100". Expanding individual threads is tedious.

Wow, it's 72 degrees in Pittsburgh today!

I love it: http://www.godhatesshrimp.com. "Shrimp, crab, lobster, clams, mussels, all these are an abomination before the Lord, just as gays are an abomination. Why stop at protesting gay marriage? Bring all of God's law unto the heathens and the sodomites." Thank you bodnej.

On a more somber note, Chernobyl, 18 years later -- a photo tour. Link courtesy of bhakti.

Livejournal is currently running a poll on whether to allow people to hide individual people on the "friend of" list on the user-info page. (Personally, I don't see what all the fuss is about; the fact that someone reads my journal says nothing about my relationship to him. And you can hide the entire list if you like.) I just noticed that one suggestion that has been made many times in the past, most recently in the context of this poll, has been implemented, though. Go look at your info page; it no longer says "friend of", but the more accurate "read/trusted by". Interesting. They have not yet made the corresponding change, replacing "friends" with "reads/trusts". And I don't know where thing stand with splitting those ideas into two separate lists, which was talked about a couple months ago. (I imagine the UI, and switch-over, will be a bit of a challenge.)

I still owe some interviews (on both sides of the desk, so to speak); I'll get to them after Shabbat and Purim. I haven't forgotten about you.

We're having about a dozen people over for Purim lunch on Sunday. It should be fun. I went to the liquor store a few nights ago to stock up. (I don't actually anticipate that anyone is really going to get completely rip-roaring drunk; I don't think I'll run out of anything. But I want to offer variety, so I now have an assortment of wine, hard liquor, and what one friend calls "girly drinks", aka cordials.) Oh, and we're having some food too. :-) (I'm making brisket, wings, fish, and assorted side dishes.)

Today Dani and I visited with sanpaku, Mrs. Sanpaku, and little canine Sanpaku. (Little human Sanpaku was with the grandparents.) They are wonderfully pleasant people, and I'm pleased to have finally met them. It's too bad they live so far away, so visits will likely be rare. (<subliminal>move to Pittsburgh...move to Pittsburgh...</subliminal> :-) )

The aforementioned canine is a miniature Italian greyhound. (I don't know if I've actually got the binding of the adjectives correct.) She's very cute and very small -- about 8 pounds. We decided to try bringing her into the house, so she wouldn't have to sit forlornly out in the cold car. Erik and Baldur were suspicious but not hostile. Except at the vet's (when they're in carriers), they have never met a dog before. I think it helped that this particular dog is small. (In case you're wondering, Embla was characteristically absent. There were unfamiliar humans in the house, after all.)

I realized after our email discussion about the dog, not yet further specified, that my mental model of a generic dog -- what I will fill in absent any other information -- is about the size of a collie. This probably has something to do with the fact that the family dog, when I was growing up, was a collie-shepherd mix. So when they mentioned a dog, I was imagining something much more imposing (from a cat's point of view).

Anyway, this particular dog was very cute, very fast when running from couch to coffee table to floor to window seat, and a lot of fun. Dani asked if she chases miniature rabbits, a question the owners apparently get a lot. This breed is also good for people with allergies; their hair is short and very fine, and they don't produce much dander. (Is it called dander on dogs too, or just cats?)

We had a nice lunch and conversation. They gushed about the kinds of houses you can buy in Pittsburgh (woodwork, stained glass, affordable). We talked about random things -- family, jobs, the local shul scene, food, other stuff. I wish they could have stayed longer.

Later I went to ommkarja's apartment for feline care. Her cat is very friendly now. I have some insight into what mine are like a week into Pennsic -- except at least mine have each other. :-) My own cats are probably confused, though; the strange dog wasn't bad enough, but I also have to bring home the scent of a strange cat!

Tonight Dani went to a pot-luck dinner with a group he belongs to, so I decided it was a prime experimental-food opportunity. I attempted to replicate the tuna in (black) pepper sauce I had recently at Mallorca. The tuna itself was successful, I think; I hadn't previously tried searing fish, and this seemed to work pretty well. The sauce itself was ok but needs work; the recipe I was following called for red vinegar as the liquid base, and it was too vinegary even after cooking, flavoring, and thickening. Next time I'm thinking either half-and-half with water or using wine instead. I don't have a lot of experience with sauces, so ideas are definitely welcome.

Later, we will go socialize with friends.

Yesterday's updates to the LJ code base removed the "s2id" argument that you could (previously) add to URLs to get your friends' comment pages to display in the default style. However, they've added a profile option to do what I really wanted anyway: you can now cause your friends' comment pages to display in your style (not an arbitrary one). The new FAQ entry is here.

(Too bad they didn't announce this in the maintenance post; I had to bother the folks in support to find out about this.)

I know there are people on my friends list who will be interested in this, so here you go.

"The Hasidic Rebel" is a well-written weblog written by someone who appears to be trying to live in two worlds, Chassidic and secular. I'm sure there are many points on which we'll disagree, but that's part of the experience. (How boring the world would be if we all agreed on everything!) He's articulate and the few posts I've read so far have been quite interesting, so I syndicated it at hasidicrebel. Thanks to peacheater77 for the find.

Several people on my friends page have switched to new ("s2") styles, which also affect the comments page. Some of those styles are, to me, unreadable -- either completely unreadable due to color/font choices or merely annoying due to graphics, spacing, etc. I seem to recall that there's supposed to be some way to impose a uniform style on all comments pages that I view, but I can't find any evidence of this feature now. Anyone have any ideas on where I should be looking? (Yeah, I could submit a support request, but I figured I'd ask my friends first.)

I'm losing my quasi-cantorial job, except in emergencies or perhaps the dead of winter. They went and actually hired a cantor. Disppointing, but I certainly don't begrudge them a professional. Still, I'm going to really miss that. At least it's coming at a time when I have increased opportunities to chant Torah at my own congregation; that's something I've been wanting to do, and gets me into more of a leadership role there.

I first got this from chaiya: go to Google, type in the query "weapons of mass destruction", and hit "I feel lucky". Don't be too quick to dismiss the results; actually read some. :-)

Interesting article on group dynamics by Clay Shirky (link from ralphmelton).

Update: Man fakes own death to get off Harvard's mailing list, courtesy of browngirl.

Last night Dani and I attmpted to see A Mighty Wind, but we were done in by an out-of-date theatre listing on the web. Pity. Looks like it's gone now, so we'll have to wait for the DVD release. But at least we had a nice dinner with lefkowitzga and tangerinpenguin first. We came home and watched the last episode of West Wing available on DVD; now we wait (supposedly not too long) for the next batch.

Tuesday night's D&D game was much fun. I've been updating the game journal some lately, though it doesn't yet reflect Tuesday's session.

I've been getting spam lately from what purports to be a couple watchdogs of the state government, but are actually just partisan publishers in disguise. I seem to be getting spam from both the Dems and the Republicans. If my cease-and-desist requests aren't honored soon, I think I'll report 'em both to the state spam tracker. Serves 'em right if I do.

I forget who it was on my friends list who recommended preachermanfeed a month or two ago, but thank you. I probably never would have poked my head in at "Real Live Preacher" otherwise, and he writes interestingly and articulately. He writes about his religion with no apologies and no pulled punches but in a way that does not alienate or demean those who do not share his beliefs. That's hard to do, and he's doing it well.