Dreamwidth and Blocking Followup
Nov. 18th, 2023 12:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
soc_puppetFollowup on my end, at any rate. I got a response from Support some days ago, confirming that banning an account from commenting/contacting you does not force-unsubscribe that account, and the suggested alternatives were to make one's journal Access Only, or to create a new account. I declined to close the ticket, and instead asked in the Additional Information tab if it would be possible to "import" entries and comments from the journal someone is essentially fleeing to the new account. I haven't heard back on that yet, and honestly am not sure I will. I may try to send that again as its own ticket or a suggestion sometime later, but not just now.
In the mean time, I've got more thoughts on third party script possibilities.
I feel like the "Copy the entries and comments from an established DW account to a new one" idea is one that might actually work as a third party script, especially since the person in question would have access to both accounts. The idea would be to reproduce the actual entries in the new account, so they'd appear in the new journal as if written by that account, but to simply copy any comment threads, so any comments made under the previous account name would retain that name. Anyone subscribed or granting access to the previous account wouldn't be subscribed/granting access to the new account. This means that the account holder would have to rebuild all of their previous links, and some may be lost due to, well, people letting their accounts go fallow, but it would still remove unwanted people from subscriptions.
(Incidentally, if Dreamwidth ever offered this service natively, I think it's possible they might charge a small fee to do so, so people wouldn't use it as a free name change equivalent. Or possibly not! My understanding of the name change fee is because it puts some additional strain on the server to redirect things; I don't think that copying over an account's contents would cause a similar strain, or would only cause such a strain for a short period of time, but I don't know a lot about coding, as you may have already figured out from this post 😅)
My next idea would be for entry obfuscation or disguise. Something along the lines of, "If UserID = Blocked User, display $Random Decoy Post" or something. So the "blocked" user would still see OP posting, but instead of the actual post's content, would get something like a randomly selected cat photo. Or a link to Wikipedia's featured article of the day (or some other random Wikipedia article), along with a randomly selected stock phrase. "Really makes you think," "You gotta check this one out!", "Man, the Wiki Walk I took from this article, I tell ya...", "I may have posted about this before, but you should still all check it out, it's just so interesting!" Stuff like that.
This seems somewhat feasible to me, at least on the surface, since Dreamwidth already has a built-in method to specify what posts by a user that other logged-in users can or cannot see. It also doesn't forcibly unsubscribe the would-be-blocked user, but still doesn't allow them to see what OP is posting while logged in, which is at least some of the goal of blocking them in the first place.
So. Those are my ideas. I feel like the first one has the best odds of diverting a stalker or other toxic follower/subscriber, and also seems easier to implement (at least on the surface), but the second one at least has the potential of giving them a headache. I also feel like I might be able to get away with asking for someone to help set up the first one on![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
holiday_wishes (probably my best odds of getting the idea out to someone who can put into action), while the second one is definitely more sketchy (and probably more resource-heavy as well).
In the mean time, I've got more thoughts on third party script possibilities.
I feel like the "Copy the entries and comments from an established DW account to a new one" idea is one that might actually work as a third party script, especially since the person in question would have access to both accounts. The idea would be to reproduce the actual entries in the new account, so they'd appear in the new journal as if written by that account, but to simply copy any comment threads, so any comments made under the previous account name would retain that name. Anyone subscribed or granting access to the previous account wouldn't be subscribed/granting access to the new account. This means that the account holder would have to rebuild all of their previous links, and some may be lost due to, well, people letting their accounts go fallow, but it would still remove unwanted people from subscriptions.
(Incidentally, if Dreamwidth ever offered this service natively, I think it's possible they might charge a small fee to do so, so people wouldn't use it as a free name change equivalent. Or possibly not! My understanding of the name change fee is because it puts some additional strain on the server to redirect things; I don't think that copying over an account's contents would cause a similar strain, or would only cause such a strain for a short period of time, but I don't know a lot about coding, as you may have already figured out from this post 😅)
My next idea would be for entry obfuscation or disguise. Something along the lines of, "If UserID = Blocked User, display $Random Decoy Post" or something. So the "blocked" user would still see OP posting, but instead of the actual post's content, would get something like a randomly selected cat photo. Or a link to Wikipedia's featured article of the day (or some other random Wikipedia article), along with a randomly selected stock phrase. "Really makes you think," "You gotta check this one out!", "Man, the Wiki Walk I took from this article, I tell ya...", "I may have posted about this before, but you should still all check it out, it's just so interesting!" Stuff like that.
This seems somewhat feasible to me, at least on the surface, since Dreamwidth already has a built-in method to specify what posts by a user that other logged-in users can or cannot see. It also doesn't forcibly unsubscribe the would-be-blocked user, but still doesn't allow them to see what OP is posting while logged in, which is at least some of the goal of blocking them in the first place.
So. Those are my ideas. I feel like the first one has the best odds of diverting a stalker or other toxic follower/subscriber, and also seems easier to implement (at least on the surface), but the second one at least has the potential of giving them a headache. I also feel like I might be able to get away with asking for someone to help set up the first one on
holiday_wishes (probably my best odds of getting the idea out to someone who can put into action), while the second one is definitely more sketchy (and probably more resource-heavy as well).
no subject
Date: 2023-11-18 10:56 pm (UTC)and your suggestion does nothing to prevent people from reading their stalkee's publicly posted entries while logged out or while logged in as a different account, which I think is why DW doesn't want to implement any version of blocking that implies anything-but-access-lock will keep one's stalker from reading one's posts
no subject
Date: 2023-11-18 11:22 pm (UTC)What I'm trying to describe in option one is basically like what's in the rename FAQ there, except an exact copy of the previous account is kept under the old name. So like. If you photocopy a letter, but then whiteout your name at the bottom and write in your nickname instead, the original copy of the letter still exists, the one with your nickname is the one you send through the mail. Because the stalker doesn't get booted from the original account, they have less reason to believe that the journal owner has and is using a new account, which might help a bit to throw them off the trail. That's my hypothesis, at any rate.
I know that it's not possible to completely and totally prevent any given person from reading publicly posted stuff on the internet, and the only way to be certain that someone cannot read stuff is to post it locked, but I'm pretty sure that at least one of the Tumblrites who want to return to Dreamwidth is thoroughly aware of this, if not both. That said, even adding one extra step to make it more annoying to do a thing can help deter a fair number of assholes. Still, I'll be sure to emphasize the whole "It's not possible to completely prevent anyone from reading publicly posted stuff online" thing when I go back and talk to those Tumblrites.