Livejournal question

[demiurgent]

So tell me something?

Why is it that, given that Livejournal is an authenticated system to begin with, you can't set display options in your Friends Page the same way you set them otherwise. For example, why couldn't your Friends Page automatically put in an LJ-Cut whenever someone has a post with a graphic more than 800 pixels wide (or whatever you wanted to do), or more than 1000 words long, or the like?

I mean, given that everyone has different opinions of how much information they'd want to see, or the appropriate types... why couldn't this be given over to their control? I mean, it'd be relatively trivial coding, wouldn't it?

Comments

[sariel-di.livejournal.com]

My bet? It'd screw with formatting in cases where people only cut part of the post. Like, oh, say I'm writing a post about a book I just read, and it hits 2K words visible on someone else's friendslist -- including the word "spoiler" where I LJ-cut a paragraph about a plot point (and cut only that comment, so there's still text before and after the cut). If LJ auto-cut the entire post or just cut the last 1K words (say the spoiler-cut was in the last 1K), it'd override my cuttag, so nobody would be able to see the spoiler warning I'd intended to give them before reading.

Images would be less of a problem to cut, I'd think, if you could code it to only stick <lj-cut></lj-cut> around the <img src=> tag, nothing else in the post. But text is iffier, depending on how people pre-cut their posts.

(Now, what I'd like to see is a way for the cuttags to actually show up on the "read comments" page, instead of only being accessible from a friendspage or Day or Most Recent view. It'd be useful in cases where you use the tags for more than just "this is really long, so I'll cut it". Also, more options for customizing one's friendspage and friendsgroups in general, but.)