Eccentric Flower talk:200906/Prog Rock
From Eccentric Flower
Comments on Eccentric Flower:200906/Prog Rock
Damn, only a 480 for that last comment. Hope I'll do better on this one. Do you take the highest score or average them to determine prize eligibility?
P.S. Can you tell I'm home minding the baby today -- he's napping right now.
-- 21:14, 18 June 2009 (BST)
ha!
They are the number of characters you have added to the page by making your comment - bigger numbers just means you wrote a longer comment.
There can also be negative numbers there, when edits to a page remove net characters. And sometimes - for example when I tweak permissions to a page or make some other non-content edit - it will show a zero.
There is a threshold after which the number is given in boldface - I believe it is 500 characters. Remember that the change listings were primarily designed for wiki admins, so the bold is a way of saying, "Hey, this guy added/removed a lot, you might want to go check." In a place like Wikipedia, a major edit like that is often a sign of vandalism.
Also, you'll notice that comments posted by our little tricky comment form carry a "(Comment provided via ArticleComments extension)" message at the end of the line. If you see changes in that list that don't have it, it means someone edited the discussion page directly.
And a bold N at the beginning of an entry means it is the first comment on a page (N for "new").
-- 21:50, 18 June 2009 (BST)
Actually, it's the number of bytes added or removed to the page. I thought it had to be number of characters too until I pasted Robert's first comment into my text editor and saw that the character count didn't even come close to matching up. Fortunately, there's online documentation that explains what's going on.
-- 22:14, 18 June 2009 (BST)
Oh, that's right, they don't use one-byte chars here. Forgot about that.
-- 23:06, 18 June 2009 (BST)
Thanks for the clarification on linkage policy, and I should probably go back through the Flutterby archives and make sure that I'm doing the right thing with your identities.
And, of course, link to more stuff now.
-- 23:31, 18 June 2009 (BST)
As to "the login stuff", having separate journals seems to be a good way to keep some things more private. I doubt that your faithful would mind reading separate locations, especially if you link to them from here. That would work for anything newly posted. For the archives it becomes a bit more trouble, I imagine, since you would have to assign different categories to different pages? Is that how it would work? I'm clueless. This is just my two-cents-worth. I, for one, follow the links and keep reading. Most if it is new to me, so I appreciate the ease with which I can access your previous writings.
(I was delighted when I realized that Stay Tuned was yours, as well. I'm not sure Sean knew it, either, and he's the one who introduced me to it.)
-- 00:22, 19 June 2009 (BST)
Bunny, I disagree about people following me around - no offense - I couldn't get everybody to follow me here, much less read in two places. And I don't think I want to do the upkeep of keeping a journal in two places. Of course, I could always keep two journals here but on the whole I think selective locking would solve most of that. The big question, really, is whether the benefits of unlocking most of the entries outweighs the risks.
-- 03:23, 19 June 2009 (BST)
For any subsequent stuff, if you're preparing an entry, you'd decide whether you want it locked or not, then post in Cruises or here, depending what you decide. If Cruises, a quick link here would be all you'd need. What makes you think your regulars wouldn't read it if you provided a link? And it would seem to solve your problem, at least from now on. The archives are still a pain, I know, but you're working your way through them.
It'd be a shame if folks couldn't link to your stuff about wine, say, or... Spike Jones?
-- 04:45, 19 June 2009 (BST)
Iain:
To produce continuity of identity
Er ... actually, no, not so much, given what you say back at LJ about why you moved here, in that comment to me where I said that I didn't understand what was public and what wasn't.
You know, I wonder if part of the issue is that your ideas of privacy and locking are colliding with the way most other people use and manage that sort of access control. I mean, the way it's handled at LJ, for example, you can't both allow and lock comments without making the entry accessable only to your friends list or some subset thereof; it's assumed that you wouldn't want people to know about the existence of the entry if they can't say anything about it and you're allowing comments for the entry.
For what it's worth, if it's going to be a big general entry where you know you want to allow public access and comment, I'd just put it in the Cruises in the first place, and link here. People who read here will follow that sort of link. And if it's open to search, they'll find it on its own anyway.
As for the rest of it ... if you can lock specific entries and not others, and you're comfortable leaving them open, go for it. I think you'll rue the day, especially since one of the purposes of this move off LJ and The Great Purge was to provide discontinuity of identity -- to scrub The Other Place and Certain Names, etc., from the public view. But if locking so much is making you wish you hadn't, then it makes sense to at least try it.
-- 19:44, 23 June 2009 (BST)
I confess I don't understand your locking/access goals. I thought the move to LJ, preceded as it was by several flocked announcements, was to leave behind the Outsiders without tipping them off. Then you turned around and posted an open item about how you're moving here. What happens when an Outsider reads that, comes here, clicks on Journal, gets a log-in page, and then asks you for a log-in? Other than aggregating the journals and other writings in one place, I don't see how you've changed access issues for yourself at all. But I'm technologically incompetent, so maybe I just didn't/don't see what you've done here on the locking/access front and it's obvious to everyone else.
-- 19:51, 23 June 2009 (BST)
Andy:
I had assumed when you went to login-required that you wouldn't be giving a login to someone who said "You don't know me; I'm a friend of Andy's". Even so, I'm less likely to post a link; I feel the link would need to be accompanied by something saying "login required, but you can get one". But I rarely post links anyway, and the last time I did, I think exactly two people followed it.
-- 21:04, 23 June 2009 (BST)
Huh. So, even after all this, what I get is that no one gets what I was trying to do. OK. Duly noted.
-- 23:14, 23 June 2009 (BST)
Just to make sure I understand: you want us to link to your entries, but they may be locked such that non-members here can't read them (and I would have to either log out or use another computer to determine said locking). You expect said person (let's say it's Alice) to register (in case it's a locked post) to read the incredible page I linked to from my blog.
And the whole purpose of the registration is to keep a small set of people (fellow cow-orkers for example) from reading them, and thus making a connection between your Real World Identity and your Other World Identity.
Have I got it right?
-- 03:31, 24 June 2009 (BST)
I don't understand what's going on and it makes me feel old. You kids keep your Facebook off of my lawn. Or something.
-- 01:52, 25 June 2009 (BST)
ProfRobert:
This is unrelated, except to the extent this is a meta-entry: What are the + numbers in parens on the comment summary page? Are they like SAT scores? Do I win any prize for having the high score on comments for the Sane entry? Inquiring minds want to know.
-- 20:57, 18 June 2009 (BST)