MW's IJ Guide
Mystic Wish is a community on InsaneJournal, but since there's always going to be people that have never used sites like these before, I figure it's appropriate to give a bit of a guide.
To begin with, InsaneJournal is one of several LiveJournal clones. LJ itself turned into utter garbage years and years ago [although if you ask me it's always been shit] and the clones all have different advantages and disadvantages over each other. IJ is the one I ultimately chose because I like their free account features the most, and if you want to pay for your account, they put permanent paids on sale often enough, which is how I prefer to put money into supporting websites because I am a cheap bastard
Free accounts still require an invitation code from an existing member. You'll be able to generate one code when your account is a week old. If your account is always free, that's basically all you'll get for invites. Paid accounts get one code for every month they pay, and permanent paids get 5 new invites every month. My account is permanent, so if you need an invite code, I can probably spare one for you and if I can't ask me at the beginning of the month.
There are a lot of things you can do with your account, as it's connected to a journal you can write in. When you first register you will probably want to play with account settings because this is the first thing you should do on any website [you do make sure you know what settings are available to you when you're learning about a new site, don't you?] Notably, by default, there are a few settings that are enabled or disabled that a lot of people will want to know right off hand so it can be changed:
*On your profile, your email address is displayed in plain text to everyone. You might not want this, it feels like a spam invitation [and could be dangerous to leave showing if you're using a work email or something] but you can change that
*You're also not informed unless enabled when someone invites you to join a community, and to manually check on this you have to use "asylum invitations" on the side navigation. I dunno about you but I'd never think to check that so I enable this
*By default, your journal allows commenting by anyone regardless of whether they have an IJ account [those show up as from "anonymous", the only option when someone isn't logged in, but this also means a logged-in user can choose to comment as anonymous themselves] and it doesn't log their IP addresses. If you want to change these, do so -- you can make commenting IJ accounts only, friends only, or to fuck with it and disable comments altogether. Another thing you can do here is enable comment screening. Note, these settings apply to ALL journal entries you make. If you only want SOME of your entries to have comment screening, you can apply those settings to individual entries.
Journal & Account settings
You can see pretty much all these links on the side navigation as well as on the Manage Account page, but here is a description of what these things are for.
*Edit Entries: You can look at your most recent entries, pick one to edit, and even look at what entries you've posted to communities and edit those all from here *Comment Settings: Enable/disable commenting or screening *Recent Comments: You can look at the most recent comments youve posted or people have posted to your journal giving quick moderation access *Manage Tags: Like on Tumblr you can tag your posts and here you can edit your list of tags without having to make a post in that tag, as well as delete existing tags you don't want any more or typoed *Viewing Options: Here you can show or hide the navigation strip, a bit that appears at the top of journals that honestly looks kinda ugly lol **It should be noted that there's an option here to "view comment pages in your own journal style" but regardless of setting it appears to only be a paid account feature *Manage Profile: Info that appears on your profile page. The "bio" allows some HTML, so you can insert pictures or whatever weirdness you want there. You can also edit the visibility of profile info -- set if logged-in users only, friends, or nobody can view the information you put in *Manage Notifications: Here is where you check what you want emails for and what you want notifications in your inbox for. IJ also lets you track as many things as you want, whenever you see a little pushpin icon you can track something so you're notified by inbox or email when a comment is added to something even if you're just lurking *Manage Pictures: IJ lets free accounts upload up to 100 pictures here. They are 100x100 pixels in size. "Keywords" are how you select the image in the drop down list of your icons, I usually only make it one sentence because I don't need more than one keyword per image, and I put credits in the "comment" field if it's someone else's art or if the icon was made by someone else. There are lots of places on IJ, LJ, Dreamwidth, etc where you can find icons *Manage Schools: You can display what schools you went to on your profile. I guess *Account Status: You can delete yourself here so that's why I'm not providing the link lol *Edit Friends: Manually type in users to add to your friends list *Edit Custom Groups: Oh these are the best. You can sort friends into lists, with the ability to put the same friend on many lists, then select these lists when making a new post to your journal and only THOSE friends will be able to see it. The site has some info for them here *Friends Filter: This lets you select who to view on a filtered friends page *Nudge Friends: I've never used this but I guess it's a feature that lets you send notifications to a mutual friend to let them know you want them to post, lmao *Invite: Here's where you generate invite codes for your friends, and you can also see who redeemed your invite
The rest of the settings are related to one of these things: Prettifying your journal, asylums [IJspeak for community], or the IJ site itself [searching the site, upgrading your account, etc] and we're about to get into the first of those things here
Making your journal pretty
I mean, it's totally optional, but here we are.
*Main Customise Area: Select which style system your journal theme uses. S1 seems to be used more than S2 *Look & Feel: Where you select a layout for your journal based on style system. S1 and S2 have very different choices. You also choose colours and mood themes *Custom Options: The text on your journal's links can be individually changed, more specific colours are chosen here, other various options depending on layout choice are provided, and lastly you can enter custom CSS to make everything look exactly the way you want *Advanced: Additional customisation that I don't really know anything about but there's documentation provided if you're curious *Custom Mood Themes: I've never actually played with this but you can provide your own pics for mood themes and I'll make one for MW one day *Link List: S2 layouts usually display a link list on the journal somewhere and you can edit what those links are here
Making posts & comments
You can post an entry to your journal by clicking here and typing up your post. On that page you can select various options allowing you to post to a community instead, adding tags to your post, setting a mood/location/music, disable comments or enable screening, entry visibility ["friends", on a community post, means "members"], and you can even date an entry out of order to change where it shows up on your journal. For an example of that last one, check twistedsamurai and notice my first two entries have dates in the future to keep them at the top of my entries list
Oh and before I go on I'll explain screening
You can screen comments so that they dont show up until you approve them yourself. This is useful for a multitude of reasons, but it looks like most people on ij use screening to protect a poster's identity or information. You can turn screening on so a person can essentially "privately" comment on a post, because you don't have to approve it, but you do get to look at it, see. It good
The last thing you'll need to know how to use are cuts, useful "read more" links that only show up on the main page of the community [or your journal when you're posting on your regular journal] that hide your content until the user clicks. Typically used to obscure NSFW content from the main viewing page, also can be used for really long text posts or image-heavy entries/big images embedded in your post. Just pressing the button in the screencap below will walk you through it:
Both entries and comments are HTML enabled and let you choose what icon to attach to them. You can edit the text of [your own] entries, but you can't edit comments. You can only delete [your own] comment and retype/correct your mistake if you made a booboo in a comment, which is a serious downside to IJ and maybe one day it will be fixed, but today is not that day. Not that this is like a forum, if you delete your own comments to fix them go ahead and if you want to reply to your own comment to correct yourself instead that's fine too
When you make a post to a community like MW I would advise tracking the post right after you make it. I track most things posted here
While viewing comments it might be helpful to know that each comment has a few links. You can link to the comment directly, useful when sending it to someone else but also for when comments get so small you can't read them any more. Replies to comments also have a "parent" link you can use to see the comment it's replying to, so if you're linked a comment out of context you can just click "parent" to see wtf is going on there.
Lastly I want to mention memories, another feature of the site that I didn't really know where to discuss or what to say regarding. It's basically like a favourites system, you can click the heart icon on entries to add it to your memories. They can be visible to you, your friends, or everyone, and you can sort them under keywords which work more like tags
Other useful shit
Things you might enjoy knowing about that will enrich ur quality of life
*Journal Watcher: External journal tracking and tools *wikicon has a lot of icons in their memories *archive has a lot of icons too *lobelia makes custom layouts *tessisamess makes custom layouts too *chestnutgallery also makes custom layouts *nameless_layout naturally makes custom layouts *mysticwish has some other useful stuff in memories too! You can click the little icons to go to the user's IJ profile, or you can click the username text itself to go to their journal entries directly. So those are actually two different links, there.
Now with all that out of the way, feel free to reply here with questions or whatever and I'll answer what I can