follow-up on blacklisting tags

[dragonlady7]

 I was just looking through my old access filters on here. I had to delete them all, because none of them contained anyone who still follows me, but one of them was called "no comms" and IIRC, I used it to load my subscription page without any communities in it. I can't think why I would have made such a filter, otherwise. But those filters didn't show up when I went to load my reading page anymore, so it seems reasonable to me that they used to conflate subscription and access filters, back in '09 when I set up here, and that functionality has since been split. 
(When you are loading your reading page, up at the top, in the center of the top bar, it says, "You're viewing your Reading page." Then under that it has a link to Manage Circle, and then there's a drop-down menu. If you haven't made any filters, the menu's empty. I have a filter called "Everybody" from which I haven't excluded anyone, but I went in and picked out a few tags from some frequent posters who talk a lot about shows I don't watch, including a community that's running a fic challenge in a pairing I'm not interested in, and so I selected that and clicked "view" and there it is, my reading page has less stuff I don't care about on it.)

But I was thinking about this as I lay in bed, and I remember from LJ, really the way people used to handle it on here is that you just put things behind a cut. And so it was no big deal, if you had a person you subscribed to who talked a lot about a topic you didn't like much, to leave them a comment and be like "hey, if it's no trouble, can you put your updates about your distressing medical condition behind a cut tag?" And then the person would be like, "Oh, I'll try to remember to do that!" and you'd be like "cool!" and then-- I'm not an expert on triggers but I'm definitely an expert in being mildly distressed by things on the Internet-- a lot of times, you'd see the cut tag and be like, you know what, I can handle this today, for my friend who cares about me, and on good days you'd click the little expand button and read it and on bad days you wouldn't, and that was that. 
Here's an example:
This morning my cat slept on my face again and while it's cute as hell when she does that, I also got a lot of cat hair in my mouth, and that just gives you a particular outlook on your day, you know?  And then you can end the cut and come back to the entry and keep talking. The bit behind the cut can be one sentence, two words, a thousand words, whatever. Sometimes a whole entry can be behind the cut. I have sorely, sorely missed that ability. It's just so easy to use it like a parenthetical aside that you know only the motivated will read. as a frequent chatterbox, I wish I could do it out loud sometimes.
Oh I've just discovered how to use the rich text entry field to do this. I am so ridiculously whatever I am that in LJ days I refused their glitchy rich text editor and hand-coded all of it, but it turns out it's pretty great now. The cut tag is the one that has three little black lines with a wavy gray line underneath. I don't know about free users but for me it's the twelfth icon in from the right. 
(Did you ever wonder why Fandom Olds sometimes typed out angle brackets around things? It's because we learned to do it in LJ and in bulletin boards. Many of them didn't support rich text editors, or if they did they came out funny most of the time. Some of my very early fic drafts, I typed <i>i in angle brackets</i> every time I wanted to emphasize a word (and in the midst of this, they came out with the new spec and it was supposed to be <em> and i never updated</em>. And some of my early Tolkienfic, I hard-coded special characters into people's names, so I genuinely got in the habit of typing &Eacuteomer as a character name. So like. Anyway. Honestly it's faster if you're in the flow of it, but. We'll see if I can kick the Rich Text habit now that I'm on it.)

My offer still stands, though, if anyone needs paid time. It's just-- you'll have to ask people to use a tag, and then hope they're consistent with the tag, and Tumblr vets probably will be, but some of us really old LJers might not because listen, they didn't invent tags until some of us had been on there six or seven or more years, and some of us clearly never got the hang of them. But boy were we fluent in please cut for TMI thanks. 

Comments

[toujours_nigel]

It's good of you to offer DW lessons, I wouldn't know where to start. Also! I have AO3 invites if you know anyone who might want them? I posted about them on tumblr and nobody bit. Maybe I ought to find a comm that takes them.

ETA: the only one i can see on DW thinks my comments are spam.

[dragonlady7]

AO3 just gave everyone invite codes for Christmas, I guess? Or they're planning to, anyway, I haven't looked to see if I got any yet.
I thought I'd see more buzz around it and was going to hop on, but nobody's discussing it much. I don't know! I'll try signal-boosting it again at some point.

I figure there's a lot of learning curve going around, and I seem to have attracted a cadre of veterans who like to comment on my shit, so if I ask dumb questions I get good feedback I can pass on. :)

I really need to come up with a poll about my cat, though, that's definitely on the list going forward.

[toujours_nigel]

Well, for Hanukkah technically? They're giving out eight each. idk that filia_noctis will have anyone to give hers to, either. I'll look around some more, I guess.

[dragonlady7]

oh yes i guess it was for hanukkah, as i typed that i was like that doesn't seem right, but then i wasn't sure. that makes a lot more sense.

[potboy]

I used to hand code everything too, but I can't remember the code for cut tags. How did that used to go?

[dragonlady7]

ha it used to be lj cut text= with angle brackets around it, and I remember when they first let you close out of cuts! it was /cut to end it, again inside angle brackets. (I don't know if the comments are rich text or not, probably not? so if i put the angle brackets in it's going to try to make the code work.)
i also remember that you could hotlink users by saying lj user= but i always got fucked up over whether to put their name in quotes or not.
and I think DW fixed all that by just... getting rid of the part where you used "lj" in the tags, because you didn't have to do that. So I *think* the tags are just the same ones.
I used to know how to do polls and also how to hand-code bulleted lists-- that last one because rich text editors fucked it up so reliably, and you'd be stuck with bullets that either nested or didn't, and it was awful. But then, I did a stint as a web developer just before browsers universally supported CSS, so I was an absolute master of nested tables.
And now nobody uses that shit and none of my skills are useful.

But for the record, an ordered list (with numbers) is ol, and an unordered list (just bullet points) is ul, and the list items are li, and you just put little angle brackets around them, and I was constantly confused by how you didn't have to close out of the list items but you did have to close out of the whole list, which in retrospect makes perfect sense.

I have, like, 3/4 of the brain required to be a decent coder, but that 1/4 I'm missing is really a doozy. As with just about everything...

[potboy]

Ha, yes, I think it was lj user= name in quotes. Thank you! I would probably benefit from being able to do ordered lists because I have a tendency to debate like a pedant using numbered lists of points, but I never learned how. I will give it a try! I hear it's still relevant if you're entering a book description into Amazon, because if you don't use basic text with your own html it ends up looking really wonky. (Which puts people off buying the book.) So it's still useful for self-published authors :)

[krait]

open bracket, lj-cut, space, text="what you want the cut to say", close bracket.

Put The Cut Stuff Here.

open bracket, /lj-cut, close bracket.


Or, if you're a visual person, replace the straight brackets with angle brackets in this code: [lj=cut text="what you want the cut to say"]
Put the Cut Stuff Here
[/lj-cut]

[potboy]

Ah, cool! I also had forgotten that you had to hyphenate lj-cut. That one used to trip me up even when I was doing it every day :) Thanks!

[dragonlady7]

OH MY GOD YES I remember now-- lj-cut was hyphenated, but lj user was not, and I COULD NOT KEEP THEM STRAIGHT and so constantly fucked up my code like a noob and it made me so annoyed!!

It still works on DW if you type "lj" in those, though?? That's.. well, I guess it's not unexpected.

[krait]

Yeah, I remember always waffling back and forth: "Is it 'lj-cut' or 'lj cut'? Is it 'lj-user' or 'lj user'?" Never did figure out why they didn't standardise one way or the other, but that lack has carried over to DW and at this point I'm so practiced it's probably just as well no one ever changed it.

(I remember DW made a deliberate choice not to change 'lj' in code to 'dw' or anything else less site-specific; at the time, to avoid confusion, because many people still posted to both sites. Maybe they should reconsider that one, now? It's probably more confusing to have two random letters in your code, now that very few people are actively using LJ...)

[potboy]

I think DW also supports plain "cut" and "user" without the 'LJ' part, so people who came here from anywhere other than LJ probably just use those.

[mosylu]

You are doing the Deity-of-choice's work here edumacating us DW newbs.

[dragonlady7]

oh my lordt, there's a lot I don't know, I'm figuring it out as I go. I'm just so much more comfortable here than I was on Tumblr, it's super nice and amazing and I feel so much less stupid.
Is there anything else I should look up for you??? Let me know. I'm really enjoying not being lost in the woods quite so much as I have been for, oh my gosh, years now.

[mosylu]

Oh man I feel like I'm learning so much just in the short time I've been here! If you ever run across a way to create drafts (you know. On purpose) and save them for later, I'm missing that now too.

I know what you mean about comfortableness. It's so much easier to connect on here. Like, actually connect, not just click that follow button and become "mutuals" who never talk. I mean my circle is tiny so I really can talk to just about everyone who talks to me right now, but it's nice.

I'm also way (WAY) less braced to say something Problematic(tm) and get 30 lashes in the public square. I think if I did screw up on here (because I'm human! I have privileges and blind spots and all those things!), someone would be like, "hey, pls consider?" instead of "BURN THEE!"

[dragonlady7]

I know they don't do drafts. it's just not a thing on this site.
I did just find out that the Google Docs is Going To Delete Your Shit thing is a little overblown, so I might use Docs to hold draft posts. I know it's not a good idea to compose directly in the window here, though I always have, pretty much... but Docs is probably the way to go, there.
(I do need to back up my Docs. What if I lost access to this account? It's dumb to have as much on there as I do.)

And yeah-- if someone is offended by something you say, they can respond directly to you, and their response stays on your page. On Tumblr, the only way to refute something someone said was either to have it be totally private, which is not always what you want, or to reblog it to your followers with your rebuttal. Just the actual structure of the site meant that any disagreement was, like, a public calling-out.
Someone could still write a post on their own page linking back to yours with a quote, and you'd have no control over that, but they'd have to have marshaled their thoughts at least enough to get it together to link to your post, and their followers would likewise have to expend at least that much effort to do the same, instead of it all being two clicks and an angry tag art session for 30,000 people to get in on it.
And you can f-lock your journal instead of deleting, if you DO get crazy-trolled, which cuts down a whole lot on what people can do.

[krait]

This is hilarious to me primarily because 1. I still hand-code LJ cuts, and 2. I still hand-code HTML formatting in all my fic docs.

I'm officially An Old, I guess! :D (I mean, "old fan is old" has been my catchphrase for like the last 5-10 years; but now I know for sure I'm right!)

[dragonlady7]

I was broken of the hand-coding HTML by picking up Scrivener a few years... or maybe a decade... back.
The text editor I used before that was literally a code editing program-- it was mostly plaintext but it had a feature where it would color-code any open tags so I got pretty spoiled. But the program got kind of... more specialized in the new update a couple of operating systems back, and I couldn't use it any more to do plain text with HTML markup, it was explicitly for coding programs, and so I switched over to Scrivener, and it was probably 2005 when that happened and in my head that's pretty recent but honestly, whole-ass humans have been born and become fully sentient in that time frame, it's kind of a long time. And it turns out my neurons know that and have shuffled along and erased a bunch of those pathways to reuse the space for other stuff, which is inconvenient but probably necessary.

[dawn_felagund]

Yep, I still handcode my journal posts. I never even experienced LJ's glitchy rich-text editor; I merely heard it was glitchy and never even tried to use it, and that habit has persisted across 13+ years and spilled onto DW.

In truth, I handcode nearly everything that will go up online, including stories. I'm writing one now that I'm not writing the HTML as I write the text, and it's ... pleasant. I set my account on the SWG to use the rich-text editor because I figured it's what most members were using, and I'd need to describe and troubleshoot it more than the HTML editor. But I still click that HTML button and just write in HTML if it's anything too complex!

[krait]

Ha! Yeah, I don't even remember if I tried LJ's editor, or just heard the horror stories and avoided it from the beginning, but considering I was hand-coding HTML sites back in the Geocities/AOL homepages days, it wasn't like it was difficult to just keep doing it by hand. If anything, I was a little worried that 'easy' LJ entries were going to erode my HTML skills, because I never had to fuss with headers and colors and such, just various forms of emphasis on a few words of text.

[dawn_felagund]

Yes, exactly! :D When I write stories in HTML, for example, I don't code in the <p> while I'm writing but do put in the text formatting ... thanks, LJ, for making that natural, just a part of the written language for me! Then I go back and copy-paste in the <p> tags.

[mosylu]

I remember hand-coding things on Blogger before they had a good rich-text editor. And I think maybe on FF.net? And my Angelfire website. Between all those things, I learned just enough HTML that it settled in the cracks and gathered dust for years until I had to resurrect it a few days ago.

[fandomnumbergenerator]

Thank you so much!

I am in such a siege mentality right now trying to rehome all my Tumblr writing, but I know that I actually need to start making sense of the DW community norms

[(Anonymous)]

Ah, I got another one I was going to write about for the fellow-refugees-- when you're importing old entries onto DW, the way to keep from absolutely flooding people's reading pages with your backlogged posts is that when you edit the date, a little checkbox pops up that you can toggle on or off to show on Reading pages-- toggle that to NO if you're importing a shitload of entries at once, so people who want to subscribe to you don't get a firehose of old stuff all at once. The entries will then be in your archive, in the correct order, but Reading pages update by when the thing was posted, not when it's dated, so it's kind of. Firehose-y.

Conversely, if someone you've subscribed to is doing this, you can use your subscription filter and just... reload the page, excluding them, to see everyone else you follow while they're doing this. But that's not a feature free users can access, so the only universal solution is to temporarily unsubscribe.

So really, it's best to have backdated entries not show on Reading pages, if you're mass-importing. I'll write it up as a proper post soon, when I get a minute, but this is not that minute, LOL.

[dragonlady7]

oh it's me and somehow i'm not logged in. whoops!

[fandomnumbergenerator]

Thank you!

I figured out the "Don't show on Reading Pages" checkbox yesterday.

I actually didn't realize that backdated posts would show up in people's feeds until someone commented on one in confusion.