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

[helens78]

I really like the balance DW struck here -- but I have to admit I'm one of the people who thinks that a.) once I comment to a journal owner, I'm leaving my words in their hands -- after all, in the greater blogosphere, many systems allow you to freely edit comments, thus making them look like they've said anything the blog owner wants them to say, and b.) if I can exercise control over them once they've been posted (as you can with OpenID), I haven't lost any control I could conceivably need.

I agree it's a really sticky issue -- but I think it's only a really sticky issue because LJ is a system that's always been a closed system up until now, rather than having the ability to export comments and, more importantly, re-upload them, with any sort of automation. If it had been built into LJ from the get-go, I doubt people would be freaking out about it now, any more than anyone who'd commented on my WoW blog complained when I switched from [domainname1].com to [domainname2].com.

What I'm not really understanding is the people who say "I blame Dreamwidth for making that ability available; I don't blame anyone who used it at all." That just completely confuses me. "I don't blame my friend for throwing a snowball at me; I blame the weather for putting snow on the ground! Regardless of how many people are happily skiing and sledding and who clearly like the snow! Snow is bad because I could conceivably get hit with a snowball -- but it isn't the fault of anyone who actually throws a snowball at me!"

[nan]

Yep, one of my friends on IJ has gotten pissy over this. I've already told her that I'll be deleting her comments off my imported posts - considering the fact that I've deleted most of the posts that aren't fanfiction, it shouldn't be difficult - but still. It's pretty annoying how people will use every little thing against DW.

[dragonscrawl]

I kinda viewed comments as a conversation in my metaphorical apartment. I can have this conversation in the kitchen, the living room, etc. The actual location of the conversation didn't matter; the content was the important bit. Correspondingly, it doesn't matter to me if comment thread A is on LJ and now on Dreamwidth as comment thread B. It's the same content and the same conversation, just in a different "room".

And the fact that Dreamwidth made it so that the people that are not me that are in the conversation get that recognition via the OpenId is pretty cool. As you say, it's a good balance between the comment poster owns their comments and the entry posters owns the comments to that entry.

[ranalore]

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

There was a very sensible post about the problems inherent in importing comments on locked posts from people you do not intend to grant the same access, but then, when I "defriend" someone on LJ, or change their filter access, I'm disallowing their ability to change/delete old comments, so that's not really a new issue. Other than that one post, though, it mostly seems to be the melodramatically-inclined looking for another topic to freak out about. And I admit to finding the mass-screening option problematic, but I don't like that people can say something sniping or moronic in a comment and then delete it, either. My wish to preserve conversations and debates, and my desire for the journaller to have control of their space, wars with the handiness of being able to edit a comment for bad HTML, missing words, and misspellings, or to delete a comment that ended up in the wrong place. I also recognize that my issues on the topic are emphatically tied to the people kicking up the fuss being the sort of people to abuse the ability to flame or harass someone and then screen/delete inexcusable behavior in order to misrepresent the situation.

[damned_colonial]

Hey, I've referred to this post in a recent post of mine at http://damned-colonial.dreamwidth.org/24328.html but couldn't link to it because it's locked. Would you consider unlocking, or perhaps making an unlocked post with the two precedents explained, but without your personal opinion if you're not comfortable with unlocking that?

[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.)