In this community, LiveJournal staff will post polls, surveys, and questions, in order to get feedback from LJ users. Feel free to comment on entries here to let us know what you're thinking! If you have questions about how to use LiveJournal, or if you'd like to report a problem, please open a support request instead.

Coming Soon: The Find Your Friends Feature!

LiveJournal users love the way their Friends page serves as a single location for all the latest updates from the people they care about. For new users, however, it can be hard to find people to add to their Friends page because they don’t know anyone on LiveJournal yet. Often they have friends already using LiveJournal but don’t know they're here or how to find them.

We're working on a new Find Your Friends feature that will make it easier for new users to find existing friends using their web-based email contacts list. Once found, they'll be able to quickly add those journals to their Friends page or send a note telling the person about their new journal. Note that only logged-in users will be able to use this feature.

However, we know that your privacy is important to you -- not all users want to be found, even by people they already know in "the real world" (sometimes especially by people they already know in the real world). So we're working to ensure that this feature provides a variety of security settings to reflect the various ways in which someone would want or not want to be found.

( The way email searching currently works )

The Find Your Friends feature will search your web-based email contacts to see if there are any matches on LiveJournal. With the new tool, we're divorcing the concepts of searchability and visibility. You will be able to have your email address searchable without actually displaying it anywhere on LiveJournal, or you can choose to display your email address without it being searchable by the Find Your Friends feature.

We're asking for your thoughts and feedback to help ensure the available settings for this feature have the level of privacy that you want.

The new setting will be "Allow others to find me by searching for my email address:" and it will have these options:

• Yes -- show my username in the search results


• Yes -- but don't show my username in the search results. Only show my email address and allow users to send me a notification about their new journal. I can then choose to add them as a Friend if/when I want to.


• No -- don't allow my email address to be searchable.

For new users, their email address will be searchable and their username shown through this feature until they make a selection otherwise - but during the signup process (specifically, the Find Your Friends portion) the option will be presented and explained. Existing users will be presented with an opt-in page after the feature is launched so they can make the specific choice that best fits their personal preference. If no choice is made, existing users will have the option defaulted to "No."

Please comment to ask questions or suggest ways in which this feature could be improved -- we want to ensure that your privacy is protected while making this feature as useful as possible. Thank you!

See this post in lj_design for details.

We've been having some conversations about how to avoid a co-maintainer removing other maintainers. As part of that, we are looking to expand the rights of community moderators - so that maintainers can appoint moderators to help them with a community, instead of co-maintainers. What do you think a moderator should be able to do in a community?

Poll #1216070 Should moderators be able to:
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

View and change the community's settings

Change the community's customizations

Invite and remove members

Ban users

Approve or reject requests for membership (if it's a moderated-membership community)

Delete entries or comments

Freeze or screen comments, and see screened comments

Create tags for use in the community

Edit and delete entry tags on community entries

Also, what about a feature that would not let a maintainer remove a maintainer who had been appointed before them (like a seniority of maintainers)?

Poll #1216071 Maintainer removal
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Make it so that maintainers cannot be removed by newer maintainers

We'd like to hear what you think - comments are welcome!

What comment below do you think best represents your position? (Click "Link" that's right after the time and date in the comment you like best, and cut and paste the URL here. You can change your response at any time by clicking on the poll number, and then clicking the [ Fill out Poll ] link at the top of the page.)

Poll #1216072 Goat vote
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Link (URL) of comment you most agree with

Back in December of 2006, we introduced TXTLJ, a feature which lets you interact with LiveJournal from your mobile phone. We'd like to know your thoughts on using this feature for notifications. If you haven't tried it before, here's how it works:

When you click the button (or "Track this" on some layouts), you'll get the option to get notifications for that event (comments on an entry, new post in a journal or community, or events like birthdays or new userpics uploaded by your friends) that will look like this:



If you've entered your mobile phone number here, you can choose to get those notifications on your cell phone by selecting "TXTLJ." Plus, Paid, and Permanent accounts get 3, 10, or 15 notifications free each month.

If you haven't tried this before and think this might be anything you'd be interested in using, can you please try it out and let us know what you think? You can check any and all that apply, and additional comments you have would be very welcome!

Poll #1192394 TXTLJ notifications
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

My thoughts on TXTLJ notifications

Hi guys! One feature that many of you have wanted for a very long time is some indication when entries are posted to custom friends groups. Right now, these entries show the normal Friends-only lock icon, so neither the poster nor the viewers of the entry know that the entry is filtered (the poster can find out by editing the entry, but not by viewing it).

The team has been discussing this, and we've realized that there may be a split opinion on who should be able to see that an entry is filtered (and to which groups the entry is filtered). I'm pretty sure no one would object to the poster/journal owner seeing this information on an entry, but some people may or may not want the viewers of the entry (those who have the ability to read it) to see the information too. So, we decided we wanted to see what you guys thought about it.

If you have a very strong opinion either way, feel free to give your reasons for it in the comments. Thanks!

Poll #1135411 Custom Friends Groups Options
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: None

Who should be able to see the custom friends group icon and the list of groups that the entry was posted to? Assume that you would only see group names that you are a part of.

Edit: Thanks for your feedback! We have implemented this feature as the majority of you wanted it (only viewable to the journal owner). You can read about it here.