The Cranky Users convened yesterday in Nurse Kelley's diary, and we were very cranky indeed! We had many, many questions, prominently among them, "WTF?" After I read all the comments there, I wandered around the site for a while and saw many of the same questions arising elsewhere. I thought I would write a short diary discussing some of the most confusing issues from yesterday, and then open the floor for cranky discussion. (If you're ready for lots of information at once, I recommend the giant DK4 information roundup published this morning by Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse.)
I received the designation Parliamentarian of the Cranky Users Group from the Crankiness Queen late in the beta test, and I take it seriously. I have been writing software since that job was called "computer programming" and the field was called "data processing"; I don't always love to follow rules, but I LOVE to know what the rules are. You cannot turn something to your will until you know how it works! Together, the Cranky Users will ferret out the secrets of DK4, and ultimately, we will triumph.
The issue of groups and group membership figured prominently in yesterday's discussion. Markos stopped by, and was gracious enough to acknowledge that perhaps the users, overall, had been inadequately informed about groups before the migration to DK4. Some of us do understand groups and still have legitimate crankiness, but for many of us, misperceptions are the source of concern.
Groups were developed with the intention of allowing people to collaborate on diary series. On DK3, this was sometimes done by having a "group" username that diarists could log in under, but that obscured the diary's authorship and led to errors where people remained logged on as the group without realizing it. It's essential to think of a group as a "writing group" in order to understand the concept (no matter what we may think of the terminology).
Accordingly, groups have three kinds of members:
Members can write diaries and place them in the group's queue, but they cannot directly publish them in the group's name. They can also "re-publish" others' diaries to the group's queue if they feel they're appropriate for the group's readership. They can see their own diaries in the group's queue, but they can't see the entire queue.
Editors can do everything members do, AND edit diaries written by others. This allows them to collaborate on a diary, by having one person write a draft and place it in the group queue, and another person then edit the draft and re-queue it, continuing until they agree to publish it. Editors can release or schedule all items in the queue for publication. They can see the entire queue.
Admins are more or less the group owner. They have all the above abilities plus the ability to invite people to membership (and kick them out!) If you start a group, you will be an admin, although you can hand that off to someone else.
You'll note that you do not have to have any of these designations in order to read or comment in the diaries of a group. Of course, groups are free to determine their own membership, so in a group like Cranky Users, everyone can be a member because we're being cranky about the exclusionary feel of using the word "member" in this way. But it's important to know, in dealing with the larger community, that you don't need to ask anyone for an invitation before you can read or comment! You can just march right in as you always could!
If you have an interest in a group's topic, you might want to follow it. This is like subscribing or hotlisting on DK3 -- it causes everything published and re-published by the group to appear in your stream. On DK4, you can hotlist/follow groups and tags as well as people. Be aware, when you do this, that it can cause a ton of diaries to show up in your stream, and it won't always be apparent why they're there. (Your stream doesn't tell you what about the diary caused it to be streamed to you.) And you can't "clear" things from your stream if they don't interest you, so if you're overwhelmed and finding your stream less than useful, the solution might be to un-follow a tag or two.
The full list of groups is long, and a little hard to browse. If you want to follow a group, it's easiest to click on the GO button for Search (top right of your screen). This brings you to the Search Diaries page, but if you wait a bit, the orange options for other kinds of searches will pop up and you can click Groups. You can search for the group by name or by word(s) in its description. When you find your group and get to its page, scroll down and look for the box on the right headed, "See More by (name of group)". Under it will be the little "follow" heart for you to click.
I'll mention a final misconception about groups, that a number of group editors have expressed. When you publish a diary to a group, it does not go only to group members or group followers. It still goes to everyone. It goes into the recent diaries list, and hopefully to the recently-recommended list (the front-page list of diaries recced by at least one trusted user) and perhaps the faithful old rec list, and anyone can read it by any of the means people used to find diaries on DK3. The difference here is that all the group's followers will see the diary in their streams, instead of having to go look for it, so it may get more readers than it once would have, especially if the diarist is not "famous". And, since all our streams, unlike our DK3 hotlists, are visible to other users, someone might come to your stream to see what you think is interesting, see a diary from a group you follow, and presto! the diary gets a new reader that way.
That's all I have to say about groups today! I am working, and also inexperienced at tending a DK4 comment thread using my "recent replies" list, but I'll do my best to join the discussion, and if we have any unanswered questions, or exceptionally common ones, when we're done, I'll look for the answers and report back in a later diary. Ready? Be cranky!!!