private favorites

I know related suggestions have been made before, but could we please have one or both of the following changes:

1) the ability to mark favorite authors, favorite bookstores, favorite libraries, etc. as either public or private? (In other words, can we have the ability to use favorites but decide whether or not we want to share them on our profiles?)

and/or

2) at the very least, prevent favorites from showing up on profiles for private accounts?

(P.S. Ideally, either of these changes would be fine-grained enough that private/public settings could be made for individual favorites, but as a 2nd best and perhaps more do-able solution, even the ability to decide public/private status for a group -- favorite authors, favorite bookstores, etc. -- would be helpful.)

Favorite bookstores I understand. There's some functionality there—a way to jump to events at favorite bookstores, for example.

But I don't understand the others. The only real feature there is exhibitionism. It's like asking for a tattoo in invisible ink.

I'm not sure I understand what you don't understand - :) - but I would be interested in using favorites like bookmarks: to keep track of a list myself, to use it for example to jump quickly to an author page to see my coverage or to go to specific works and shop for them (via the buy, borrow, swap etc links), or to keep track of my favorite locations without having to share them with others or publicize where I hang out. I've never thought of any of these features as self-expression or exhibitionism, but as a way for me to mark places on the site that I like to go or track. (Which is I guess why I use them in a very limited way, and I don't use authors at all now - since I'm not that interested in telling others who my favorite authors are.)

I am surprised, though, that these features would be public on a private account (I tried it).

I've had these questions before (esp. about the privacy of Local), but they arose most recently when I was thinking about using favorite authors to keep track of authors who are on my current reading list or shopping list: to fill out my reading or ownership of favorite and important authors. I thought maybe I could do this and make my account private for a time if I didn't want to share these lists, but nope.

requests like this one baffle me too.. we do know know who the others on the site really are..

Even if you use your real name jonsmythe as a user id.. so what? who knows you , unless you give further info to friends you make here?

I like the tattoo in invisible ink metaphor..lol

Seriously. It is like algebra was to me. I never did get algebra. I will never understand why users who are anonymous want to hide things about their libraries..

baffled am I

It would make sense to make the authors private in case you ever decided to give them functionality. For example, there is an excellent suggestion here.

Personally, exhibitionism baffles me. :)

On the serious side, I'm not anonymous here and don't wish to be. But there are certain aspects of my reading habits that I prefer to publicize and others I don't. I don't display favorite authors partly for that reason: I have favorites in my professional reading and favorites in my personal reading, but I might not want to display both or either publicly. At any rate, different people want to use the site in different ways - others may have things they wish and don't wish to share that are different from my preferences - and different people have different thresholds for sharing information about themselves. That's fine, whether I understand another user's preferences or not. The site already has some functionality to accommodate different preferences, e.g. public vs. private catalogs, the ability to mark friends/interesting libraries or not to, etc. - I'm just suggesting more.

exhibitionism?

exhibitionism |ˌeksəˈbi sh əˌnizəm|
noun
extravagant behavior that is intended to attract attention to oneself.

Is that what not minding others seeing your favorite authors is to you?

interesting. I consider my library, my stars, and even to a large degree my reviews to be for me. perhaps, to avoid exhibitionism by the masses, we should list nothing? I certainly do not list books to draw attention to myself.

I was referring to Tim's post at 2: "The only real feature there is exhibitionism."

It's probably not the best term for this, but note the smiley face. My point is that I have things I want to make public and others that I don't. My reasons for this are mine, others might have others. That's fine with me. Just making suggestions here.

I am not attacking your motives... I just don't understand them. I do disagree with one thing.. we .. you... are essentially anonymous, as only some know more about you than what you show on your profile, and these are people you have chosen to tell. Even if you told me your name address and serial number.. whatever.. you would still be anonymous to me, as I basically am to you?
or so it seems to me :)

Yes, but if you know another user in real life you might be able to identify them from things on their profile and in their posts. There might be things that you don't want public because people you know, like your boss, are also on LibraryThing.

This isn't so much about favourites, but about privacy in general:

Mckait, you don't seem to be considering the possibility that people we know in real life might also be on LT. I certainly recommend LT to my friends and family all the time. Currently I only know of 9 people from RL who are on LT, but I'm hoping that number will grow. Maybe I don't want my mother browsing through my erotica collection and would prefer to make that part of my library private. Maybe I don't want my supervisor to be able to see exactly what fiction I read in my spare time. Maybe when it comes time to apply for academic positions, I don't want to worry about people judging me on the fact that I still have a lot of Sweet Valley books from my childhood.

I obviously haven't bothered to conceal my identity here, but even if I had used an anonymous screenname, people might be able to identify me based on the city I live in and the books I own--the children's and YA series from the mid-nineties give a good idea of how old I am, I'm in the Graduate Students group, and I own a lot of classics, math, and history of math/science. Based on some of the books, it's possible to tell what courses I took. And the math/classics combination is pretty rare....

So anyway, the site isn't as anonymous as you might think. Rather than concealing all our information (i.e., taking our library private) to make sure that no one can find us, why not let us make public just as much as we want to?

Anonymity would be if I didn't use my name or any personally identifiable information at all. It's pretty easy for people who know me in the real world to figure out who I am if they stumble upon me here, based on my username and the kinds of books I have. Both now and especially later (when I'm no longer a padawan but - perhaps one day - a prof) it would be fairly easy for people in my field to identify me.

I'm sorry about the term "exhibitionism," if it offends anyone. It's my term for the desire to tell others about yourself online—a powerful thing and one of the main reasons this site works.

Perhaps you are right Zoe, but if you have issues with people knowing what you read or which authors you like.. again... baffled.

Frankly I don't care what you keep private...it just seems odd to me. I thought perhaps I had as much right to say that as one would to say that they want their authors hidden?

In real life, people frequently judge people by what and who they read.

The choice here is to make a complicated series of preferences that allow you to show and hide your favorite authors and so forth—another five or six radio buttons in some preference screen or other.

The alternative is for that small percentage of private members to remember or bookmark what they love.

LibraryThing has a lot of options, each takes time now and time later, as it's maintained. When the option is a big or even medium-sized win, we'll add it. I'm just not convinced here.

>15 mckait: Of course you have a right to say that, but your bafflement baffles me. Do you really not understand that people's careers can be affected by how other people perceive them, regardless of where that perception comes from or how accurate it is?

>17 timspalding: It's the "or so forth" that I'm really interested in; I don't think the option to hide favourite authors would really be worth it. I do think it would be at least a medium win to let people make individual books private and set privacy settings based on groups of users (e.g., friends-only).

>15 mckait:,16: It's not even necessarily about having issues with people knowing what you read, or being judged. One's hobbies, readings, musical tastes are only public if one decides to make them so. These aren't public by default: they are things one chooses to disclose. Not everyone does. For my part, I've decided I don't mind people seeing what books I own, but I don't personally see any need to display who my favorite authors are. I'll happily discuss this with my friends, or talk about it with anyone for that matter: it's not that they're secret, it's that I see no need to publicize them.

Perhaps someone wants online information about her/him to concern only her/his professional life (doesn't care for students to know what books s/he read as a child, or for colleagues to know that sh/e really hated particular scholar X's work). Or perhaps someone might want only to display things about her/his life outside of work. Or perhaps someone wants to invent or cultivate an online persona that is quite different from his/her face-to-face persona. All that is fine. It's just about having the flexibility to facilitate those choices.

17> I take your point. I don't know how widely these options would be adopted (but then how widely is "hide tag mirror" used?). Personally, I'd be more likely to favorite more things - and use favorite authors at all - if I could decide whether or not to make them public.

I am curious, though, about why the default would be to show these favorites on the profiles of private users.

>18 _Zoe_:

Yes, I agree with you about that. It would be a medium win. It would be more work, though. Probably the lower-value win would be a simple binary system—if a friend, you see books. Something more complicated would be, well, more complicated.

I have to say, though, I have another concern. The openness of LT is what made it work. Very many of the early users of LT would have used it whether or not libraries were public. But the fact that openness was the default was what made it grow as it did. (The same dynamic has been seen elsewhere, in Del.icio.us, for example, which did not really improve on other bookmark managers, except in having open defaults.) Some of those people went on to use the system in more social ways, and all contributed to the open "feel" of the site. So, in a sense, while I acknowledge the desire on the part of many users, I worry that granular privacy will change the tenor of the site in a way that would hurt everyone down the line. See what I mean?

I am curious, though, about why the default would be to show these favorites on the profiles of private users.

Users will do unexpected things with features, but the feature was intended by me—and I think used by most—as a way to express yourself, not a way to keep bookmarks. So it shows up for private users for the same reason that a talk post by a private member shows up.

see also this thread on "marking individual books private":

http://www.librarything.com/talktopic.php?topic=3554

I posted my reasons for wanting privacy in #27. The same reason that I would want most/many/all of my books private is the same reason that I would want my favorites private.... ok, I posted that I like John King Books in Detroit, but I don't live near Detroit... but I love going there & spending obscene amounts of time & money there when possible!!

I've truly frightened people when I've found information on them or others online & commented on it to them. A friend had a "discussion" with a collegue/consultant... the discussion involved some older/newer theories. The consultant mouthed some of the new theories, but their actions & subsequent advise came from practices that were decades old.

I was able to find that person's date of birth.... and other references to education & specific focuses (foci) within our field. The person's experiences were such that they were out of date!! But they were treated as an expert..... only when it was to the hierarchy's advantage to do so.

That knowledge (of age & experience) gave a welcome relief to my friend, but the fact that I could find that much information on someone helped her to understand how relatively easy it is.....

No, the person whose information I found never knew what I did & I never took that information to anyone else. Just because I can find information, doesn't mean I use it.

22: Right, so the moral of the story is that very, very little of what one does online is truly private or anonymous. I've also come across people who've been very surprised when friends found their (not as anonymous as they thought) blogs or their social networking pages, and mentioned something about them in conversation.

I have to say, though, I have another concern. The openness of LT is what made it work.

That's true; I've actually been expressing a similar concern lately in discussions of what should be on the private homepage vs. the public profile page. I guess I don't really have enough information to judge how important this is. Are there very many private libraries now? I periodically see posts about people taking their libraries private for various reasons, but maybe they're so small in number that it doesn't even matter.

4,8,10 (mckait): It is not you or other essentially anonymous LT folks that concern me; it is people that I know, to varying degrees. Privacy levels make complete sense to me. I have sent a link to my library to family and friends, in part as "exhibitionism" in the same spirit that another person might send photos, in part because I'm so enamored with LT that I want to advertise it. My user name is private in that it is not my real life name, but it is a string of letters that I use elsewhere when I wish to be semi-anonymous and that some people who are neither friends nor family associate with me -- it is just too much trouble to have multiple secret identities. Most of my books are public to acquaintances, displayed on my shelves for anyone who enters the house, and this is the level of exposure that I have on LT. But I'm with rsterling and Zoe here. I haven't yet entered all of my books, and I begin to have doubts when, for example, I get to the books that I own because a friend has an illness that s/he would prefer to keep private -- they don't fit with the rest of my library and could raise questions that I don't necessarily want to answer. I would like to have private tags -- i.e. the tag itself and any books associated with it are not on display to everyone. I can imagine not wanting to give any indication of my location (though in fact I've put it in my profile). I can imagine wanting to reveal only the portion of my library and of my interests that represent my professional existence, without having to set up a separate account for everything else.

18, 20: Sure, there are various levels of complexity that could be envisioned and implemented here. As long as we're talking about privacy options more generally, I'll second the requests made elsewhere for Collections to include a public/private switch for particular groupings. I think that's a bit less fine-grained and less complicated than having specific privacy settings for different groups of users. I can see some benefits of having the latter (more access for friends, etc.) and it does seem (from recent posts) that this is how new members sometimes expect friends to work, but I'd be satisfied with something more simple - e.g. privacy options for wishlists, other Collections groupings.

>24 _Zoe_:

Private users: 14,282
Books held: 1,819,212

So, few, but more active.

21: I also like LT's openness, and I think the way to keep that is to keep default settings as "public." Then it's a judgment call about what level of finer-grained privacy settings will maintain that open feel.

I guess I'm more agnostic about the suggestion to have differential access for certain kinds of users (friends vs. the rest of LT): but then, I don't know, because on the other hand that might be something that would allow otherwise fully private users to come out of their shells a bit and make use of more of the social dimensions of the site. (I say this in full sympathy, as someone who sometimes contemplates going and has gone private at times.)

I'm probably not as interested in self-expression as other people, or at least not in the same way - at least not via public lists of favorite authors etc (though I do a fair amount of disclosing by word and deed on Talk - inside joke, sort of). But that means that there are features here that I might make more use of but don't and won't use now. I've been tempted, for instance, to list the bookstore in my old hometown or a bookstore where I've worked as favorites for purely sentimental and personal reasons, but I've resisted, because - quirky as it may seem - where I grew up and where I've lived is information about my life that I might happily disclose to friends but don't care to share publicly online.
(edited for typo)

I'm finding it hard to see any nastiness here. But then again tone is often hard to discern in online fora (for instance, I've interpreted some posts on this thread as snarky, but not particularly Zoe's). Generally though there's a kind of live-and-let-live norm around here: don't criticize people for not doing or seeing things exactly the way you do, don't tell people how to use their libraries, and let 1000 flowers bloom. This is a community, yes, but people live their lives in different ways, as in any community. Some people use it as a private list of books (emphasizing the cataloging features) and others use it as that plus more. There are already private library options. Some people would like more privacy options, others would not. It's a debate, a discussion. The LT staff will decide which of the many suggestions users offer are worth developing and which are not. Users will provide feedback on which suggestions they find the most useful. That's the way it works. As a community, though, people generally try to keep discussions in Talk civil. Occasionally nerves get frayed, but this does not seem to me to be one of one of the higher-stake threads.

(edited for typo, as usual :) )

#29:

Many people do choose to limit what they list. I do, for instance -- there are half a dozen or so books that, for one reason or another, I don't have listed. These are the books that I don't want, say, my mother or my boss to know about. (Sure, I'm anonymous here. It's a name I use elsewhere online, though, and I've also given the link to my library to people -- and once one person knows, I need to assume that anyone potentially could know. All being anonymous really means is the association can't easily be made with a search engine.)

Other people make different choices -- some choose to list their sensitive books, and have a totally private library. Others list them and rely on anonyminity, or list them and don't worry about it. I don't think you need to mock them for this.

That said, I think "different privacy options for collections" is the only one of the suggested new options I really think is necessary or useful. My gut feeling is that a private collection would mean more openness, not less -- people with currently private libraries might choose to keep just a few titles private and go public with the rest, while people with currently public libraries are unlikely to choose to take more than a handful of titles private. I think "friends-only" libraries would have a chilling effect on openness.

RE 31, your last paragraph on private collections vs. friends-only, and their respective effects on openness: yes, I think I'm coming around to this position too.

I'm not trying to sound snarky/uncaring/etc, but for those (comparatively few) people who want these certain privacy options, what's wrong with just making another account that is private? It seems to make sense to me: You like being open to a certain degree here, so you don't want *this* library to be completely private, but you also have concerns about real-life people finding you and judging you... so make another, private, account in which you can house all the "controversial" things that you may not want people to see.

.... Or is that solution too simple?

I can certainly see how big of a change this would be, how much work it would be to implement tons of privacy-level options, and frankly we already have a private-library option, so.... I guess I just don't see the need.

Although, as the OP suggested, I do see a reason for making favorite bookstores private.

33 Yes, that's one of the options I think some people have adopted, and one I would consider for things like my old children's books, which I haven't cataloged and would like to keep separate -- that's if collections never happens, and if I ever get around to cataloging those particular books. I could also open a private account just to use for favorite authors, favorite libraries, or favorite bookstores that I didn't want to display on my main site (although they would, it seems, display on the profile of the private account - but that might not matter if I just pick a good pseudonym).

So there are definitely work-arounds, and those you suggest are probably best at present. I prefer the idea of private collections for books I don't want to make public, if "collections" ever happens. But since there have been several threads suggesting more privacy options recently, and several in the past, in this thread I just wanted to add a couple of suggestions to those already out there. Turns out mine (in message 1) seem to be pretty idiosyncratic (for authors at least: privacy options on Local have been raised before), but sometimes you never know until you post.

>21 timspalding: Tim, I agree about openness being key to LTs success. However, I don't think adding options to make some things private will compromise this to any noticeable degree.

The point I think you may be forgetting is that, although LT is a social site, many users also view it as a tool for cataloging and managing their complete libraries, as well as exploring their interests in books generally (not just those currently owned). Some users (many? most?) first come to LT not for the social aspect, but because they want to catalog books, and LT makes it easy and fun. Later, they may make more use of the social features--but the initial attraction was a fun and easy cataloging system.

For those users (and I count myself among them), there can be a conflict between the desire to use LT as a cataloging & book/author exploration tool, and the lack of more fine-grained privacy options.

Personally, I do not list certain books on LT, because I do not have the option to make them private or share with only a specific set of users. I also do not list my favorite authors, precisely because I don't want to share that information indiscriminately.

>29 mckait: I honestly don't understand what your thought process is here. Generally, if someone else's view doesn't make sense to me, I either let it be or ask for an explanation so that I can see where they're coming from. I would not just repeatedly say that their views make no sense, while ignoring repeated explanations from a large number of people and finally resorting to unfounded accusations. What are you hoping to get out of this? Do you think that calling people baffling and nasty will make them come around to your view that privacy isn't really important after all? (Hint: it won't.)

Your "justification" (one of the side effects of anonymity ?) doesn't even make any sense, since a large part of this discussion has consisted of people explaining how LT isn't so anonymous after all. How could I be hiding behind a screen of anonymity when I've just said that that anonymity doesn't exist? There's enough information on my profile that I could easily be found in real life.

I enjoy the openness and wonder why if there is a concern the private libraries option is not taken.

The goal is to avoid forcing people to make their entire libraries private when a lesser privacy option would suffice. Obviously the openness is a good thing; if no one cared about openness, we'd all have private libraries and not be bothering with this discussion. We're looking for the balance that will result in the most data being public.

>31 lorax:, 32 I'm coming to think that you're probably right about a friends-only privacy option being a bad thing.

>35 rsterling:

No, I recognize your points. I just worry that users' instincts are wrong. If, before you started a library, users were asked if they wanted it public or private, I bet you far more would choose private. Instead, the default is public, and I think everyone is better off for it. It's a patronizing view, probably. Users don't know what they want.

I think that, in the end, I'm interesting in allowing private books in a public library—whether done piecemeal or through a collections feature. But I'm not that interested in setting up a system where private libraries are public to friends, or whatever. Even if people want it, I don't want to promote clubby unsharing. I think it will spread farther than it should, and make LT seem clique-ish and segmented.

38: I think you may be right about more people choosing private if it was asked when you started.... For example, if I had been asked when I joined, "do you want to make your library private or public?", it would've started me thinking about WHY it's being asked, and I'd probably go the more cautious route of being private, only because I don't really know the site yet, so there must be some serious reason they are asking that.... is it bad to have it public, are people going to steal my data??

Okay okay, so maybe not everyone is that paranoid, but that would be MY reaction.

>38 timspalding: I think you're right.

39: I might have had the same reaction, and more so if the site had listed pros and cons explicitly. As it is, I joined LT to organize my books (I'd been thinking about creating a database, but LT was much easier) without thinking about privacy issues, and have only gradually and sporadically entered into the social aspects -- precisely the process that manque describes in 36. Now that I've been here awhile and advertised my presence, I'd like to carve out a private area (another thread suggested this as yet another use of collections), but it's certainly not a pressing issue. To answer your question in 33, I don't have a separate private library because the inconvenience outweighs the usefulness; I'm about at the level of lorax in 31, shielding from public view only a tiny proportion of my books, which I can keep track of mentally.

38: "Even if people want it, I don't want to promote clubby unsharing. I think it will spread farther than it should, and make LT seem clique-ish and segmented."

I agree; I wouldn't want that.

I originally started using LT just to catalog my books, but I think the sharing aspect is very cool, and I discover something new every time I log on. I'd definitely weigh in against "friends only" privacy, but I understand the desire to have a privacy option for specific books or for individual collections.

I came up against this issue just this week. I bought a couple of hentai (porn) manga as part of my personal exploration of the manga phenomenon. I debated leaving them off of LT, since I wasn't sure if I wanted them to influence how I appear to other people, including LTers that I don't "know" in the physical sense, but who might check me out after reading a post or whatever. (Sex is a touchy thing in American culture and some people worth knowing might make snap judgments.)

I decided that I'd go ahead and include those books (and they're tagged hentai, so anyone searching for people with hentai can find me). If we had private collections, I might have made them private . . . or maybe not.

I would argue in favor of recognizing that the cataloging function of LT is significant, though. I fully understand why people want to be able to have all their books in one library, even if they don't want to share all those books with everyone. The problem with private accounts is that you can't share anything with everyone.

Of course, the other question that has to be considered is "would it be a pain in the butt to code?" I'd rather have collections with no privacy option than wait a long time for collections with privacy.

In summary, some privacy options could be useful, but I'd personally put them around the middle of the priority list.

>43 Helcura:

Yes, at present, collections comes before the privacy change. I'd considered and dropped the idea of true book-by-book privacy. Rather, I'm going to see how easy it is to combine with collections. I am not sure, frankly.

I support having a private collection, where all books in there are private to you. Friends-only is a lot iffier, especially since that changes the current abilities of friends.

44: just wondering, does that mean collections will not initially have any privacy features? I know a lot of people want to be able to mark specific collections as private, and that's one of the main reasons they want collections and main advantages they see in using them (see discussions in the various "what should collections do/be" threads*). Wishlists, for example, are something many people ask for, but some people might not use unless it was possible to make them private.

*These are getting a bit old now, but see here and the more recent revival here.

"Rather, I'm going to see how easy it is to combine with collections. I am not sure, frankly."

>21 timspalding:

"Users will do unexpected things with features, but the feature was intended by me—and I think used by most—as a way to express yourself, not a way to keep bookmarks. So it shows up for private users for the same reason that a talk post by a private member shows up."

That was my line of reasoning when, having figured out how Favorite Authors worked, I half-expected to see reviews from a private library show up in public. Of course, since as it is everyone is used to their not showing up, I'm not suggesting they should be made to show up automatically, but if there was an option to make individual reviews public I'd certainly consider using it. Though I'd be the first to admit that this would be mostly a workaround in the absence of a privacy setting by book or collection, and the creation of a new feature as a workaround for a future feature which would probably be further delayed by it doesn't make a lot of sense. (I also admit to having written a "review" of exactly 255 characters and put it in a tag.)

To the people who want to privately keep track of favourite authors I'd suggest to put the word "favourite" (or whatever) in the private comments field. You can search it (and not sort by it, so it can't mess that up), and this way you can even mark favourite books.

Sorry to resurrect a partially dead thread, but I thought that would be preferable to starting yet another. I was doing some exploring and experimenting, and I am (still) curious about why privacy applies to certain features and not others. I realized, for instance, that friends and interesting libraries aren't displayed for private members even if they have them. Effectively, these become just like private watch lists, if your account is private, even though for other members adding someone as a friend or interesting library is (understood to be?) public, and therefore different from private watch lists.

This seems inconsistent to me: if going private entails that some information about you isn't displayed, then why would other information remain public? Friends and interesting libraries seem to me to be just as much "self-expression" as favorite authors, favorite bookstores etc, in the sense that members *currently* use these features knowing that they will be publicly shown on their profiles. But they're also possibly just as little about self-expression, since some people might want to note their favorite libraries or their friends and interesting libraries simply for their own use, without much regard for whether that information was public or private.

You'll probably guess that I'm *not* asking for friends and interesting libraries to be displayed for private libraries - I'd prefer other things (favorites, etc.) were also private by default for private members. (Even better, of course, would be more options about what to share and what not to share, but I appreciate that this would be more complicated, and that there doesn't seem to be much demand.)

As a "private library", I'll add how I deal with the "public information" part.... I don't use it.

The only "favorite bookstore" that I list one that is one that is a few hour drive from where I live... John King Books in Detroit!! Absolute Heaven.

I don't mark "friends", but I do have a few "private watch" people (friends) that don't show on my public profile page.

Yes, it "deprives" me of a feature on LT... big wow!! I'm not that interested in it. I'm not going to jump up & down & say "why can't I?" or "it should be THIS way!!" or "I WANT ______!!" or "It has to be THIS WAY!!!"

(can you tell I don't like whiners? or the current epidemic of affluenza??)

And I would also guess that the coding for this can be complicated since there would be a fair amount of "opt in" & "opt out"

Don't get me wrong. I love LT, and I'm quite happy using it the way that I do (public library - which I occasionally contemplate making private - with, for the moment, separate private accounts for wishlists). My suggestions and questions should not be interpreted as complaints or demands. My latest post was born out of a curiosity about why privacy affects certain things and not others.

>50 skittles: Incidentally, I think the upshot is you could use friends and interesting libraries if you wanted to, and they wouldn't show up on your profile - though presumably it would still send a message to the other user.

rsterling:

I do understand about your postings... and I am frequently "flummoxed" about why & how things work... I do my best to "roll with it" simply because it is (a) easier (b) less energy (c) I can't do the programming myself (d) it isn't my site (e) I don't have to make any decisions... they are already made for me!! (f) if I need a work-around, I WILL find it!!

My personality is that of a trouble-shooter & "fixer".

I can also give up "control" of some things if I can find an adequate solution (& protection) to those things that I find essentially important.

As far as the "friending issue" here... I have "friends" but I don't need to announce it... if I need a "connection" to see their library I can always use bookmarks.

Also, I have wishlists, but they are at bookswapping sites that have different user names than I use at LT. I tried tagging my wishlist books, but it got to be too much to keep up with.

#49

Fair question.

Incidentally, while I'm OK with having everything public in my account, I understand completely that needs vary and that more nuanced private options in particular would be useful to many.

(Don't apologise for this thread!)

No apologies necessary. It's coming. I'm going to do it right, if I can.