phatic conversation

[xax]

okay so now that a nonzero number of people are moving here from tumblr i feel like i should explain a lj/dw feature that i have sorely missed all through tumblr's lifespan.

that is the reading filter. so the 'reading page' is the equivalent to the dash, right, in that it shows all posts from everybody you're following. but you can also make subgroups using the filter tool, by manually putting specific blogs into a filter. things like "only art blogs" or "no porn blogs" or "only news feeds" or w/e. or "everybody except for {person}" if for whatever reason you're following somebody but hate their posts. (there's also the inverse, an access filter, where you can give specific people access to specific posts, e.g., "nsfw art" or "personal life" stuff if you don't want to broadcast that publicly. once you have one they'll show up in the 'Show this entry to:' dropdown.)

by default the existence of these filters and who is in them is private and not shown to anybody, although you can make them public if you want. if somebody embeds images in their posts and can check the referer log for where it's hosted, though, they can see the name of the filter, and apparently, who's using it. this has lead to fandom drama in the past wrt filters of the style "everybody except for {name}".

basically this is why i'm following back w/ anybody i know on dreamwidth even though i never did that on tumblr, because now i can make a filter that's like "people i actually talk to" vs. "everybody" to get a pared down version of my reading list

Comments

[hebethen]

Wait, how does that image embed referrer thing even work?

[xax]

oh just like, when somebody's running a webserver, that webserver generally generates access logs -- who's looking at what. this records time of access, file requested, ip of request, stuff like that. but http requests also come with another field, the referer, that tells the server where it's requesting the thing from.

so every time you click a link, the request (generally) comes with the page you're on attached. and when your browser requests images, the same thing happens, with the referer being the page where the image is embedded. sites use this for stuff like search engine optimization, or access control (to forbid hotlinking or whatever), and so on.

so if somebody's checking their reading list through, like, http://user.dreamwidth.org/read/people_i_hate, and somebody in that filter posts an image, the server that it's hosted on will get a hit in their access logs like 'such-and-such ip requested someimage.png at so-and-so time, and the request came from http://user.dreamwidth.org/read/people_i_hate'. that's not an issue if the server is like, imgur or whatever, but if somebody's posting an image from a server they control, they could see that logfile hit and get real mad.

[hebethen]

Ohhh, I see. Thank you for explaining so clearly! That is definitely Way More Secret Drama Potential than I ever expected when I first saw that feature, haha.