Members Only

Scott Hardie | May 19, 2012
I'm pleased to announce a long-overdue upgrade for this site. Well, two of them.

The first is minor: Rather than "users," I'm now calling all of you "members" across the site, except for a few places where you might be called player. "Member" just feels more positive to me. The word "users" has an impersonal connotation, like you're just a commodity. You mean more to the site than that.

The second change is more important: You now have granular privacy control over everything you write in Tragic Comedy, and have written in the past.

Check out the comment form at the bottom of this page. If you're logged in, you should see four privacy options for the comment:

anyone: Anybody can see your comment, whether logged in or not. Search engines can index it.

Funeratic members: Only people who are logged into this site can read your comment. Strangers see "hidden by author request" instead.

certain people: A list of checkboxes should appear when you click this, naming active TC participants only. Designate who you want to have access to your comment by checking their name. Anyone not checked will be unable to see the content. (You will still be able to see it, of course.)

only me: No one but you will be able to read your comment.

These privacy options now appear when you add a comment in discussion, when you start a discussion, when you write a blog post, and when you reply to someone else's blog post -- in other words, everything that you do on TC.

There's now also a privacy page where you can review every piece of content that you've ever submitted and compare the settings. It may take a moment to load in full if you've written a lot. At the bottom of that page, there's an override form that allows you to change ALL privacy settings for every piece of content simultaneously, if you're in a hurry.

Some caveats:
- These privacy settings only apply to TC. Anything you write in the other sections of the site will still be visible to anyone.
- The title of any discussion or blog post that you create will still be visible to anyone. Any poll that you create at the top of a discussion will still be visible to anyone.
- Once you change the privacy setting for a TC comment, it may take a few minutes for the blurb on the "current discussions" and "saved discussions" pages to change with it.
- The search forms on this site now only consider content that's visible to anyone. If you mark any of your content private, even you won't be able to find it by searching.
- If any search engines like Google have indexed your content on the site and you mark the content private, it may take a few weeks to disappear from their results.

Speaking of search engines, I've been working hard to make Funeratic more attractive to them, because we need more members to find us and sign up. The more content there is for search engines to index, the more ways that people can find us. For the benefit of us all, please consider leaving your content visible to anyone unless it really means a lot for you to keep it private.

In the past, if you replied to a blog post and marked it secret so that only the blogger could read it, I've adapted that into the new system with the "certain people" setting, as if you had checked only the blogger's name.

Members have been asking for this kind of privacy control for a long time, and I'm glad to finally offer it. I hope those of you who are shy about sharing your thoughts with the world will now feel comfortable writing things for just us on the site. Please let me know what you think, and if you have any trouble using the new feature. Thanks!

Chris Lemler | May 19, 2012
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Scott Hardie | May 20, 2012
Thanks Chris!

The checkboxes only apply when you've chosen "certain people." So if you want to exclude someone, choose "certain people" and check everybody except that person. If that name doesn't appear on the list because that person isn't currently active in TC, no problem: Only the names that you check will be able to see it at all, so that necessarily excludes the one person you're avoiding.

Lori Lancaster | May 20, 2012
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Matthew Preston | May 20, 2012
I like it a lot!

Quick note: The checkboxes show up for me by default, even though "anyone" is selected. If I choose something other than "anyone" and go back to it, the checkboxes disappear.

Scott Hardie | May 21, 2012
Thanks Lori! It was quite a bit of work, but I'm glad to do it. I recently made a list of about 20 Funeratic projects large and small that I've wanted to do for some time now, anywhere from weeks to years, and I've committed myself to spending weekends this summer getting them all done. It feels great to have four of them crossed off already -- this, some SEO changes, announcing GooCon 2012, and programming zombies in the goo game -- and I'm looking forward to the rest. Each task will get successively harder and more time-consuming, but I'm looking forward to every one. :-)

Thanks too, Matthew. If you refresh this URL in your browser, do the checkboxes hide until needed?

Matthew Preston | May 21, 2012
Yes they do. And things appear to be operating correctly. I'll send you a private message if I have any more issues.

Scott Hardie | May 21, 2012
If anybody's curious, the "certain people" checkboxes pre-populate according to who's on your friends list. I bet some of us have gone a very long time without updating that. :-)

Erik Bates | May 21, 2012
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