about moving to dreamwidth smoothly & openID

[nerakrose]

this brought to you by the current massive move to dreamwidth and the fact that a few of you seem to have rookie problems with it.

1. the flist
on dreamwidth, you do not have a flist, you have a circle. you also have an access list. unlike LJ, in order to maintain a successful flist, you need to both grant access to and subscribe to a friend's journal. when you grant access it means your friend can see your flocked ('access list' only) entries when they visit your journal and vice versa if a friend has granted you access. however, in order to see your friend's entries on your flist (reading page) regardless of security level (public or access list), you need to subscribe to the journal.

in the screenshot in the section below you'll see two blue exclamation marks. these are the mutual access and subscription lists. those numbers should match. more on the flist in the section below, as well.

2. openID
related to the flist: when you import your content to dreamwidth, your flist imports automatically as openID accounts. so you have all your lj friends already on your access and subscription lists! very neat! for this to work perfectly, you need to claim your openID, and your friends need to do the same. (here's the link to the faq that explains how to do it.) there's no need to hunt down everyone's dreamwidth journals to friend them all over again, if everyone just makes sure to claim their openID accounts.

i'm not aware of any good reason to not claim your openID, so I'm going to proceed as if claiming your openID is the best thing ever.

here's a screenshot of my access and subscription lists from my dreamwidth profile:


you'll see that some openID accounts also figure in the mutual access/subscription lists. this means that the dreamwidth accounts in the mutual lists have not claimed their openID. if they don't want to, that's their prerogative of course, but honestly, why wouldn't you?

other benefits of claiming your openID account:

a. imported comments will be attributed to you.

here you see comments on an imported entry in rs_collab . because i've claimed my openID account, my former nerak_rose.livejournal.com openID account is gone, and has been replaced with my dreamwidth account. the comment i'm responding to still belongs to an openID account because that person hasn't claimed their account/hasn't moved to dreamwidth.

b. entries in imported communities will be attributed to you.


i haven't yet created a mod account for rs_collab and claimed the openID account on its behalf, which means i am unable to edit this entry or any of the other entries in the community.

however, when i imported my fic rec community from roserecs to roserecs, all my entries were automatically attributed to me once i claimed my openID account, which means i have full control of everything and not just new entries i posted after the import.


that's all i've got. i hope it helped.

Comments

[hollys_tree]

This is an awesome entry. Will share it on my flist! :)

I claimed my open ID account and all the comments I imported now show up as mine as far as I can see. I find it weird however, that my open ID account hollys-tree.livejournal.com still exists and there are about 2500 comments linked to it. Hmm. I guess I can write to the support at one point, but I think they have their hands full at the moment.
(it said on the open ID page that names with - and _ in it might be bugged.

[nerakrose]

:D

yeah, dreamwidth is probably really busy right now! i wouldn't be surprised if some things get buggy along the way. mine went smoothly despite the underscore, but that was a while ago.

[fosfomifira]

This is a very useful entry. Thank you for sharing all of this info :)

[nerakrose]

i'm glad it was helpful! :D and no problem at all.

[likethenight]

I am slightly confused by the whole openID business. Given that my username here is different to the one I had on LJ (which doesn't bother me one bit), is there any point to claiming it? What actually is it? I never did get my head round it when they introduced them...

(eta: I've read the how-to, and I am still none the wiser as to what it's all about! >.< so confused!)

[nerakrose]

As far as I've understood, openID are placeholder accounts. I.e. If you don't have a livejournal account but want to comment on a public livejournal entry, you can sign into livejournal with openID and leave a comment that way. When dreamwidth imports stuff, it'll make placeholder openID accounts for the livejournal accounts who have commented on your entries/are on your flist/have posted entries in your community. If you have people on your flist who have already moved to dw and claimed their openID accounts, they'll show up in your dw circle under their dw journal when you import, not their openID one. And if they claim it later, the openID account will disappear from your circle and be replaced with the dw journal.

If you don't want your dreamwidth account associated with your old LJ account, then don't claim the openID associated with the LJ account with your current dreamwidth handle. (A solution to this would be to have a dummy dw account for that kind of thing, so that you'll still have control.) There's no requirement to claim your openID if you don't want to. Although if you aren't going to claim yours, let me know and I'll revoke the access granted to your openID...

For me it's about two things, 1) ensuring that my flists transitions over smoothly and 2) retaining control. I have already deleted all my old finndom entries from comms like sweetndeceitful years ago, but if I hadn't, and you import the lot? I wouldn't be able to delete the imported entries in the imported community later, unless I claim the openID account that posted them in the first place. It's like an insurance for the future, if any other lj comms get imported to dw, any entries I made there I will have access to. Comments I left on imported fest entries will show. (In that case it'll also show that I am an active dw user and that I'm not just "reduced" to being somebody who once left a comment on imported (and, implicitly, archived & non-active) content. For HP fests and comms that's hugely relevant to me as I do consider myself still active in that fandom - and if everyone else also claims their openID, then dw will be less like a historical archive of old content and actually an active place to be.

[likethenight]

riiiiiight. So. If I want to claim the xspitefulangelx openid but not associate it with likethenight on DW, I have to make a DW account under xspitefulangelx in order to claim it? Or do I claim it under the xspitefulangelx LJ account, but then what happens if I delete that LJ? Or do I just not claim it? I don't much want to associate with it here (I'm trying to distance myself from it as much as possible, tbh), and I haven't posted in any comms in years (and the comms I posted in have been dead for years, and I'm pretty sure I've already deleted everything from there in my big-novel-associated-purge-of-fandom a few years back, so I don't think I'm going to need to be deleting stuff from here.)

...on the other hand, if I were to claim it under this handle, I'd at least show up under my current username in imported-from-LJ blogs like yours (although since you and I, and anyone else that would be likely to apply for, all know who I am under both names, I'm not sure if it matters). Does it show anywhere that the two usernames are related?

Sorry to be so dim! I just cannot get my head round it. I find this sort of thing inherently more or less terminally confusing... XD

[nerakrose]

Your dreamwidth username is irrelevant to the openID username. They don't have to match.

If you use likethenight to claim xspitefulangelx.livejournal.com then any and all comments and posts attritubed to xspitefulangelx.livejournal.com on dreamwidth will show as being made by likethenight. It won't appear anywhere that I know of that the two are related, BUT, if you don't want entries in, say, sweetndeceitful, to be tied to likethenight, use a different dw account to claim the openID (if you are going to). You can make a dummy account and name it spitefuldummy, or whatever, it doesn't matter what the dw username is.

Does that make sense? Claiming the openID account enables you to do more stuff with the entries/comments attributed to them than you can do with just an openID account, but like I said before, it's not required or mandatory and if you don't claim it, you always have the option of doing it later. But you can't unclaim an openID so beware of that, and make sure you're logged into the right account when you do claim it.

Eta: because I missed a question. You can't claim an openID on dreamwidth with an LJ account :p only a dreamwidth account. and deleting the lj account shouldn't impact the openID either, as dreamwidth created those openID placeholders based only on your lj username, not your account details or whether it's active or whatever. An openID based on an lj username on dreamwidth has technically nothing to do with lj anymore.

[likethenight]

Ummmm. I think I understand a bit more now - thank you for bearing with me! I am not going to bother claiming xspitefulangelx with likethenight - I already have 'spitefulangel' as a DW username (it's where my fic archive lives), but I'm not using it. I suppose I could claim it with spitefulangel, and then at least that part of my life is all together. I'm pretty sure I deleted everything I posted to s&d anyway - I now run it from another account XD but I've claimed the openID for that one.

In any case, I'll be using likethenight from now on, so if you do want to revoke access to any of the variations on spitefulangel I've used over the years, feel free!

One more question, just in case you happen to know the answer - once one has imported one's journal and been crossposting for a while, do you know if it's possible to import the comments on the LJ-crossposts back to DW? The import page says you can import as many times as you like, and as many journals as you like (so I've got both my LJs in likethenight now), but it skips duplicate entries...so I'm wondering if it would replace the non-commented-on posts on DW with the commented-on ones from LJ, or just skip over them. Not to worry if you don't know, I'll go bother support with it, but I thought it was worth an ask!

I won't be sorry when all this is over and done with! XD

[nerakrose]

no problem! and i discovered this entry today: https://bisharp.dreamwidth.org/233213.html it links to a number of other posts about various dw, open id and import topics, so if there's something that's still bothering you, maybe have a look there? there's probably somebody who managed to explain it better than i did.

all right, will do :D

yes you can! on the import page, you can choose to import only comments. that should take care of any comments left on lj on crossposted entries. i'll be doing the same before i delete lj for good.

[likethenight]

Brilliant. thank you! I'll have to do that before I delete for good.

And that post looks excellent. Thank you! :D

it's hilarious, this whole process has brought to light journals and comms I'd entirely forgotten I was involved with XD *deletedeletedelete*

[nerakrose]

no problem :)

when i deleted my fic journal earlier this year i found out it was still member of several communities i wouldn't want to be caught dead in... XD i visited each of them and did a filter for entries to see if i had anything in them, and if so delete the lot.... XD