I just went to look something up in a diary I wrote Saturday for This Week in the War on Women - I wanted to share a link in a comment.
Now it isn't really very long between Saturday and Wednesday; though we do republish relevant diaries throughout the week, I didn't think it would take long. But I found myself scrolling through miles of text in what was not really a large number of diaries.
It took that long because several of these diaries were long and all written in the intro section of the diary.
With the advent of DK4 many of the restrictions on diaries were lifted. We can now write more than one diary a day, for one, and our into is not limited to three paragraphs. Now, I appreciate not having to pare down my intro sections, and I used to get very annoyed when I'd get a message saying that I had too many words. But it served a purpose.
Especially with groups.
I belong to a number of groups, and am administrator of two. As administrator, I check the queue regularly to see if some diaries are there to post to the group, and to go through the diaries on the group list. The intro section appears on lists, and this is where the problem arises.
I would like to ask diarists to consider this when writing. If you don't mind other Kossacks having to scroll through pages and pages of text when they check out your diary list, so that they give up after only one of two diaries, that's fine, but you are losing readers for more of your writing.
But it's inconsiderate for those of us who might want to republish your diaries to various groups, and to readers who look on group diary lists to see what's new on the relevant subject. That's one way you can attract new readers who might not otherwise see your work. Intro sections that go on for pages discourage browsers from looking further, and can keep them from discovering other writers as well.
So please, use reasonable thought deciding how much of your diaries belong above the orange squiggle so that readers want to continue, and if they decide to check out more of your writing, doesn't discourage them.
Thanks.
6:50 PM PT: Thanks to all of you who read this and made suggestions for quicker ways to find things - that will help in future. And for an interesting discussion of a subject I wasn't sure anyone would care about. Perhaps the solution lies in changing the larger section to "Body of Text" or some such.
6:59 PM PT: And changing the title is a good idea.