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changelog.What is ESN? It stands for Event/Subscription/Notification. It lets you subscribe to anything interesting going on. It won't be marketed like that, it'll probably be called "Subscription Center" or "Watch list" or something.
A lot of the implementation details of that old post have changed, but the general idea is exactly the same:
-- tons of things on the site fire events:
journal has a new entry (lj_dev just got this post)
somebody posted (brad just posted to lj_dev)
new userpic (a friend of yours just added a new userpic)
somebody befriended you,
new support request in a category,
....
-- users can subscribe to events (subject to privacy/stalking/etc), or aggregates of events (any of my friends adds a new userpic), filter on properties of the events (only posts in lj_dev tagged "esn"), and then choose which notification method to use:
-- notification methods we're thinking about (won't all be available at launch) include:
website -- online inbox of events (which we also want to allow POP3 access to)
jabber
sms
web-service request (HTTP POST, XML-RPC, SOAP) to user-defined endpoint
So think: you can make your own alert flows. Think of it kinda like Automator for LiveJournal.
Anyway, if you're interested in the code, it's at:
cgi-bin/LJ/Event.pm
cgi-bin/LJ/Event/*
cgi-bin/LJ/Subscription.pm
cgi-bin/LJ/NotificationMethod.pm
cgi-bin/LJ/NotificationMethod/*
And there a bunch of tests in:
t/esn*
The plan at this point is to launch with only the post/comment events primarily, as a test, but we'll also have befriended, new userpic, and some other trinket-y ones as a demo. Over time we'll add more and more events, and will also convert all our legacy notification systems (existing emails, support notifications, etc) over to ESN's framework.
If anybody wants to get involved, adding new event types would be the most helpful thing. Maybe somebody wants to convert the support area?
May 4 2006, 08:26:31 UTC 6 years ago
And how about some kind of API for external access?
May 4 2006, 08:45:42 UTC 6 years ago
How about events for "posts that were formerly invisible to you are now visible to you" and vice-versa?
Also RSS is an obvious notification method. But watch out: someone might syndicate the RSS feeds back on the site, with wacky recursive hijinks ensuing...
May 4 2006, 09:00:37 UTC 6 years ago
"Anyway, if you're interested in the code, it's at:"
Does it mean the system is already in beta and we can betatest it? Forgive me if I misunderstood, I'm not native speaker.
May 4 2006, 09:03:09 UTC 6 years ago
Yes, I think I've misunderstood, I'm no coder; I thought this is code to put somewhere in profile options to test these new features ;) Sorry for the mess!
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May 4 2006, 09:11:10 UTC 6 years ago
!!!
it's great!May 4 2006, 09:15:30 UTC 6 years ago
May 4 2006, 10:11:53 UTC 6 years ago
May 4 2006, 17:29:22 UTC 6 years ago
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May 4 2006, 11:23:25 UTC 6 years ago
I appreciate that you have said "subject to privacy/stalking/etc", because almost my first thought (after thinking that I need to tell a friend who's been wishing for a notification on being befriended for a long time) was that there would be a great hue and cry from users about the potential for abuse.
I predict that one of the events of great public controversy will be "journal has new entry", with one camp saying that people who want to stalk them will subscribe to this instead of adding them to their friends list, and will be thereby invisible, and another camp saying that there is nothing stopping the would-be stalkers from visiting the journal page in question regularly, and anyway, haven't the complainers heard of an RSS feed?
I would recommend that journal-associated event subscription availability be settable to Public, Friends, Custom Group(s), and Private, much like tagging is now. This would give user-level control, so the people who are Public (like a frog) can enjoy the attention, and people who have concern about people watching their online actions (with or without justification) can control these things.
Obviously site-general events like support requests wouldn't be controlled by users. A user's setting of subscriptions to the event "new comments in my journal" to Friends obviously should not override someone getting notified of a reply to their comment in that journal.
For rollout of user-controlled ability to subscribe to events generated by their journal, I would recommend having them set all the security together, before enabling the ability to set things individually and fine-tune.
May 4 2006, 17:04:08 UTC 6 years ago
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May 4 2006, 19:55:41 UTC 6 years ago
yes please!
May 4 2006, 12:18:26 UTC 6 years ago
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May 4 2006, 13:34:28 UTC 6 years ago
After all, LJ's friends page is nothing more but a fancy RSS reader, with all the external feeds that I have befriended by now.
May 4 2006, 15:52:02 UTC 6 years ago
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May 4 2006, 18:22:45 UTC 6 years ago
Heh. We're running out of things that have been on the todo list so long that everyone's forgotten about them. What's left now? I can't even remember.
I'm looking forward to a Jabber event sink; can use that to make local caches of things without needing to poll, which has to be good. Could even go crazy and “subscribe” to a syndication journal's new entries to trigger a proper RSS fetch, thus faking a server-push aggregator. Fun times.
May 4 2006, 18:27:08 UTC 6 years ago
I remember ages ago we talked about giving every LJ user their own private “notification journal” which would appear on their friends page and show any events targetted at it. Not necessarily implemented as a real journal, but presenting that illusion. Though why not just use a real journal? It can just clean itself up after a couple of weeks like syn accounts do. Main hurdle is that we still can't have anonymous accounts, and having to name all of these special journals would be horrible.
May 4 2006, 18:57:46 UTC 6 years ago
May 4 2006, 18:25:33 UTC 6 years ago
Are you talking about individual support requests or the entire board? There's already a notification option for the support board as I'm sure you're aware, but it's essentially worthless for high traffic sections like Gunk since you get flooded with email if you turn it on. I'm just a little confused about what you're refering to here because I remember from when I worked in support that it emails you when there is an update. I'm pretty sure that was true for both Internal Comments and regular comments, but I never ended up getting to supporthelp, so I'm not sure.
Please keep us informed about this. I don't know about other users around here, but this is the one feature that I'm most looking forward to.
May 5 2006, 00:45:17 UTC 6 years ago
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May 5 2006, 10:07:08 UTC 6 years ago
And no, I didn't somehow just post that anonymously. *headdesk*
May 10 2006, 13:15:33 UTC 6 years ago
Email-only interface to LiveJournal
An email-only interface to LiveJournal was described inhttp://community.livejournal.com/lj