Ah, here we go

[branchandroot]

I was wondering when the comment-importing skirl would start.

And it's true, the transfer of content such as comments lies in a rather strange and precarious area. There are two major competing precedents I can see.

One is the correspondence precedent, which says that comments on a blog are as personal email--they are personal communication whose copyright is retained wholly by the originator and which may not be transferred or copied without permission, beyond such quotation as may be covered by fair use. This is complicated by the public nature of a comment and the fact that acceptance or rejection of its publication is in the hands of the blog owner as well as the comment author.

The other is the contributor or submission (or even 'letters to the editor') precedent, which might consider comments to be as articles or notes, contributed or submitted to the 'editor', that is the blog owner, and subject to publication, deletion and republication at the editor's will, though only under the original terms of access/remuneration/etc. This is complicated by the personal nature of a comment and fact that no blog/journal site I know of has any explicit statement to the above effect.

Personally, I think DW has struck about the best balance that can be struck in this push-pull, by ensuring there is no content alteration, retaining all original access and terms and providing (currently in the works) a mechanism for mass screening by the comment author.

Comments

[azurelunatic]

I sort of wish that the import capability hadn't been put live until the mass-screening capability was.

Right now there's at least one individual who's commented to my journal who has requested that no comments of theirs to locked posts be imported. I'm sort of mad about that -- not at them, but because the resulting situation is socially unstable and tedious.

I have imported my journal wholesale, and I have started using it; there is no delete-the-whole-thing-and-redo available to me that won't lose the new entries and comments, and in any case nuke-journal is now being reserved for actual importer problems, not me being a whinybitch. Their comments, regardless of security, have been imported. So it is too late for me to not import until the mass-screening tool is available. They asked that for everyone who was importing, to do one of the following: delete their comments off non-public LJ entries prior to import, delete their comments off DW entries where the source was non-public and imported, provide them with the locations of non-public LJ entries where they'd commented so they could delete prior to import, provide them with locations and access to imported DW entries where they'd commented where the source was non-public. Hi. How many years have we known each other? How many non-public posts have I made in those years? Who exactly should be doing the tracking-down of stuff here? It's not fair of them to demand that I track it down. It's not fair to them that they be forced to track it down. I'm generally upset, with no fair target for me to be upset at.

(I did, in the end, use view-by-security to locate my friends-only posts and go back through and look for comments by them and delete them, which took less long than I feared but longer than I really should have stayed up.)

[branchandroot]

*whistles* That is indeed a whole lot of trouble. Curious choice, too, I'd have expected people to be more put out about comments on public entries.

[azurelunatic]

This is someone who well understands that public is public, and there's no locking a barn door. They have their reasons for not wishing to use Dreamwidth, and without even inquiring about them, I am sure that they're well and sufficient and informed.