The Lair of the Emerald Serpent

There's Izzie reading all the stories about how the evil live journal goblins are trying to airbrush history by eliminating all traces of deleted accounts - not just the entries in their own personal journals but anywhere and everywhere the 'disapparated' have left calling cards. So lots of communities have big black holes and gaps in conversations
This has apparently happened even when folks have ticked the boxes requesting their legacy on other journals and communities to be left untouched in the same miraculous way that automatic payments keep getting turned back on.
So when Izzie heard that the comments hadn't really gone but were merely hiding under invisibility cloaks along with all those subject lines in comments, decides to do an LJ comments only import once the drama had died down

Silly serpent. Should have left well enough alone. Was under the impression that the importer would recognize cross posted entries. But it didn't. So now every entry since May 2009 now has a doppelganger but none of the LJ comments came over which was the whole point of the exercise in the first place
Did try zapping one of them only to discover that having not turned off the cross posting option, its original over in LJ land also got nuked. Can always restore its twin over in LJ land with an entry edit on this side but will save that for later

So Izzie will leave the tweeking for the moment. Just so long as the terrible twins don't go crawling all over our friends pages it should only be a minor inconvenience

Izzie is seriously wondering if the same goblins at the serpent day job have invaded the dungeons of Live Journal
Posted a comment to a friend the other day and it took four attempts to finally get through. Annoying but not surprising with all the zombie attacks over there lately. Then posted a reply to another comment only to notice that the comment pages had changed. Oh all blue and pretty with options for embedding media. How elegant and shiny innocently thinks the serpent without taking a second look

And then the Dreamwidth mob with their amazing talent for understatement posted in one of their regular and informative maintenance updates "Dreamwidth is seeing some extra traffic today, so we're rolling out a new webserver to handle the extra load."

Popped in to see what all the fuss was about. Should have guessed by now. So followed the comment trail over to the latest Livejournal release post only to see one serious shit storm. What the hell could be going on that they are now up to 130 pages of very pissed off comments?

Yesss. It turns out that like the Izzie day job they are all sizzle and no steak. Who cares if it doesn't work as long as it looks pretty. And if the customers don't like it just tell them that it is "Company policy' so they will just have to get out or get used to it.

A bit silly to add an option for media links to comments when they have gone and zapped the old preview option so you cannot even check if you have posted the link properly or 101 other tricksy things when html is concerned
And then there is this new nonsense of a drop down menu of thumbnail icons by image and not keywords as a default setting!
All those users with ten zillion userpics are just homicidal. Users on slow connections or limited bandwidth are obviously no longer welcome

But aside from zapping the preview option - do they really think people will pay extra to be able to edit their comments? The thing that is annoying the hell out of this serpent is the sudden disappearance of subject titles in comments
Except for when replying specifically to a subcomment, Izzie nearly always uses subject lines in comments because it makes it easier to find stuff and it is such fun finding appropriate titles
Guess the point of that is to make the 130 pages of replies to this latest ridiculous innovation simply impossible to navigate

Guessing the next thing they will do is ban paragraphs and spaces between words in order to increase the available space to fill with wannabee tweets
A far cry from Dreamwidth who still have subject titles and the option of numbered comments so that you can be blind and follow the various nested threads because you are not completely dependent on indentation to see who replied to what.

Some users have commented that it will seriously stuff up gmail notifications of comments which will end up all lumped together

They have also stuffed around with expanding comments, nesting and stuff.

It brings to mind an observation from a certain Cat
A sufficiently advanced level of stupidity is indistinguishable from malice

So here's hoping that yet more of the serpent associates abandon the Titanic and come over to the cosy user friendly Dream boat. They even let you cross post so you don't even have to pack up your stuff. They do journal imports too but the queues are a mile long at the moment
But the icing on the cake - you don't have to pay to escape the plagues of adverts because there aren't any.



PS The 132 something pages of comments are most fascinating if almost impossible to follow thanks to all the bright shiny new features

But we thinks that flyingnimbus should get the Live Journal customer service award of the century
The kindness and compassion is just awe inspiring

Anyone else getting nostalgic for the good old days when pink and fluffy management BS coming from the LJ News room used to be an annual event?


PS Some amusing translations of the Boss's latest Newspeak offerings are doing the rounds
And some while uncannily accurate, are not quite work safe