I have an extra journal where I post specifically about music, and it has its own journal, but its a bit of a pain to update because I have to keep changing who I am logged into my client as. So I thought I'd just change it over to a shared journal like I did with my journals for programming and quizzes, so that I could update it from my primary account, which is would be nicer because my main account is paid and lets me post via email, even to my shared journals. Both of the other journals that are now shared journals had a number of posts when I converted their type way back when, and I found the way that it converted it to be quite acceptable. Not a big deal to go back and do that once more, right? Well, not quite.
It seems as though you can't do that anymore, because to convert it to a shared journal, you first have to convert it to a community, which you can't do anymore if you don't want to delete your old posts and lose all the comments that go with the entries. Sure I could back up the entries and repost them (backdated?), but there's no way to back up and repost comments from other users (and for good reason I'd think).
I recall at one time this was added as a safety feature to prevent creation of communities out of your personal journal by mistake. I don't see any significant reason from a logic standpoint why it wouldn't make sense to make a shared journal out of a personal journal that already has entries in it. Its been done before and I think it should be able to be done again.
And then I remembered at one time, in relation to that change to make the community creation tools smarter, there had been talk of a proposed change to allow creating of shared journals directly from personal journals? I tried checking whether you can do that at the console, but it whined that my journal was not a community--and I can't make it a community without deleting all the existing content. Can anyone from the LJ team comment about whether direct conversion of personal to shared journals is still being considered or not? Would this take a major overhaul of existing code to implement or just a few small changes here and there?
'Cuz I'd really like to convert my existing journal to a shared journal as-is, without deleting the existing content, just like I did to my other shared journals, but if that feature isn't going to come back, it'd be nice to at least just know that so I can get over my hopes that I'll be able to fix it to post from my main account in the future, and find an alternative solution, even if its a less ideal solution. Or maybe similar to a journal rename, people could pay LJ $5 and you'll convert an existing journal to shared journal? I'd pay a one time fee for something like that...
