Invoking Aahz's Law

[womzilla]

In which it is said that the best way to get correct information about a subject is to post incorrect information about it.

I've just been playing with LJ friends groups. One of the features of friends groups is that you can set a group to be "private", which as nearly as I can tell, does nothing at all. I would think that the existence of a private group would not be visible to anyone not logged in to LJ as a member of that group, but that's apparently not true. As a test, I just created a private friends group "nyrsf_cabal" featuring the NYRSF staffers whom I know have LJs, and the contents of it are visible to all.

I would expect that a "public" group would somehow be visible on my User Info page, but that, too, appears to be untrue--the public group "castle" contains supergee and nellorat, but no info about that shows up on my User Info page.

Thus, I posit that "private" and "public" is a meaningless distinction. What say ye, assembled wisdom? What am I missing?

Comments

[cheshyre]

Actually, when I try to view your private friends page I get

Denied

Sorry, the friend group you are trying to access does not exist or is not public.

Re:

[cheshyre]

Appending to this (LJ is being real poky all of a sudden), only the owner can view private groups, whereas anyone can view a public group, if they know that one exists.
[I discovered this a while ago, while trying to show my husband something in http://www.livejournal.com/users/cheshyre/friends/rr and he couldn't view it until I made it public.]

Does that make more sense? If not, try logging out of LJ and viewing your private group again.

Re:

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

See, that's how I thought it should work. And, lo and behold, it does. When I was testing it, I logged out (using the "log out" button), but it continued to show me the private page. When I shut down and restarted my browser, it worked as expected.

Aazh's Law triumphs again.

Thus we know with certainty that faster-than-light travel is possible.

Re:

[cheshyre]

That's one of the reasons why I kept my UI the old fashioned rainbow top with sidebar links, rather than the new default blue format.
It makes it easier to tell when I'm logged in or out, and when I have to refresh the browser/page...

Re:

[redbird]

Had you posted this to the support board, I would have pointed you to the cache-clearing FAQ.

Re:

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

My only cache-clearing FAQ is "why the hell don't browser caches work?"

The functionality isn't difficult, but as far as I can tell, there hasn't been a browser yet written where the cache works smoothly. Why is that?

(In the case of MSIE, it's in part because Microsoft doesn't want it to work properly. But what's the excuse for the Mozilla products?)