On Members Only and some other things

(like most of my entries, the picture doesn’t really have anything to do with what the entry is about)

Seems like there’s always a lot to talk about these days ????

You don’t have access to this page

There’s some understandable confusion going around about how privacy on the new site works – especially for people who are here on a 30-day free membership who are having trouble accessing other members or their entries. If you have been trying to respond to notes from somebody, or click through to an entry from somebody, and getting the “you do not have access to this page” message – the below is probably why.

On new OD (as on old OD) there is a privacy setting for both diaries and entries that is Members Only. On new OD, Members Only means that that diary or entry is only visible to members with a paid subscription. For this reason, if you are on a free subscription and you try to access a Members Only diary or entry, you will not be given access.

The reasoning for this is to protect the privacy of our members. One of the main reasons I think the world needs a site like OD is that we all need a place where we can write about, talk about, and share the things that we can’t share out on the rest of the internet. We all feel the need for some privacy to write about our real lives, and our real feelings.

The way OD is set up now, any person can come and start a 30-day free subscription, just by giving us an email address. In the opinion of the OD team, this is not a high enough bar to protect the privacy of our members, who often really don’t want their entries available to the public. So, Members Only is intended to solve that problem, by making membership in the site a requirement to view the content.

For those who don’t mind having their diaries and entries available to anybody, there is of course the Public option (which many of our members use). I hope that helps to make sense of this!

Diary imports

I know there are still a lot of people waiting for their diaries to finish importing into the system – thanks for your patience! The good news is that (like other parts of the site) Engineering has been working overtime the last four days to speed up and optimize the parts of our system that were running slowly, and that includes the imports. We are now moving much faster through the queue than we were a couple days ago, and there are only a few dozen diaries still waiting to be imported. I expect that all of the imports will be done by this time tomorrow, so if you are still waiting it shouldn’t be much longer.

Also, something I forgot to explain earlier – for many diaries, we imported the first ten entries into the diary when we first started setting up the site months ago. This was so we could do some realistic testing with content, and also so when people came back they would see -some- of their entries instead of an empty diary.

However, because I failed to explain that, I’ve seen some people who think the import is broken, or that they have lost entries. It’s not that – it’s just that you have a few of your entries and when the import catches up, it will restore the rest.

Again, thanks everybody for your patience!

A few other tips

Just some things that may be useful if you haven’t tried them:

• You can (somewhat) change the fonts in your entries – if you click the dropdown that says “Paragraph” in the editing toolbar and then select one of the six Heading fonts, your text will appear in a different (sans serif) font. This is what I’m using up above where it says “A few other tips” – that’s Heading 3. The problem is, it doesn’t look like that font in the editor, which is something we are working on – but for now you can do this if you really, really want a different font.
• You can also change font colors if you want, it’s two buttons to the right of that dropdown.
• OD now supports backdating and future dating entries – in the Options dropdown when you’re writing an entry, look for the Publish On option – you can set that date for the future or the past, if you want!
• You can also set an expiration on an entry of twenty-four hours or one week – this is something we didn’t have before. If you set this, it means that the entry will just be like any other entry (visible to whoever you give access to it) until it “expires”. When it expires, the system automatically changes it to Private so only you can see it after that.

Things we are working on

In the software industry, the features that you are developing for the future are called a “roadmap”. We have a lot of things on the roadmap for OD in the coming months – some of the big ones that we are working on now and hoping to release soon include:

• user search, so you can search for and find other members by OD name
• autosaving entries as you are writing them, so if you have a connection problem you won’t lose your work
• a better Friends list, that will show people in order that they have updated since your last visit
• improving the interface and organization of the Profile and Settings – it’s a bit hard to understand the way it is so we want to make it easier to use
• there’s a lot more, but those are the top priorities at the moment

I think that’s all for now, I want to say a real thank you to everybody who has come back here in the last four days – it has been so exciting to see this place come alive again!