Bo Jones. Or maybe Dennis. (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
nookiepowered) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomhigh_ooc2012-02-17 09:08 am
nookiepowered) wrote in fandomhigh_ooc2012-02-17 09:08 am
Entry tags:
Livejournal Update: State of the Goat-Punching
Hi, folks. We know you've been waiting on news and discussion about Fandom High's future location and how we're going to work that out as a community. So have we, but it's been pretty scarce, and thus there hasn't been much to pass on before now. Livejournal has been exceptionally Livejournalish for the past month, even more so than usual, about not letting us know what's going on and when/if things will be changed.
Like we said back in the Open Forum, though, while we still hope we can stay with LJ, your admin critters don't want to be them, so we want to keep you up to date with what we've been doing and thinking.
We've been gathering as much LJ-based information as we can by tracking comments in the existing![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
news and lj_releases posts, new posts in the changelog community, and also joining the Russian language beta, lj_ru_beta. Sadly there's a very limited amount of news we can glean from those last two, for technical reasons with changelog and language reasons with the other. (Huge, huge thanks to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
taseredagod for helping us post feedback there by translating it into Russian so the techs could understand it.)
We've also been keeping up on the changes made at Dreamwidth; we're happy to let you know that they've now set things up so that imported comments can be "claimed" and attached to the owner's Dreamwidth journal. So if a move does happen, you'll be able to fix all those Open ID comments in old threads, and automagically put the icons back so everything is pretty again. (As long as the player is still around to do that for their old/current character journals.)
In the OF, we said the plan was to announce a decision about LJ vs. Somewhere Else by February 19th, with a poll beforehand (unless things at LJ got so very fixed that staying seemed a foregone conclusion). We're still planning on a poll, and we're still not going anywhere if the majority of players vote to stay. We do, however, need to shift those dates a bit, due to some hopefully-good news.
Up until yesterday, after several delays where it seemed like info was about to come out from LJ and then it didn't, our intent was to put that poll up for you on the 16th. (And extend the decision deadline by a few days so you'd have more time to vote.)
However, while the company was busy touting its new LJ Media community program instead of saying anything about fixing the problems from the recent release, one of the volunteers let us know that the non-Cyrillic Beta version of Release 89 just went live for the staff and high-level volunteers, and it does include the long-promised classic comments style.
It seems to be tied to Minimalism (aka the S2 style that most of us are using right now) in a way that might mean we'd still be limited in our journal designs to an extent -- we don't know the details beyond the phrasing of the tweets the volunteer made. If so, though, there are a lot of Minimalism designs to choose from (around 40 just from LJ, plus any customized layouts that users have created) so it could still be a pretty workable option for all of us, if Classic Comments are available for all Minimalism layouts.
With this in mind, we're expecting/hoping that Release 89 will go public sometime next week, and we'd like to hold off on polling the game about staying or moving until after that happens. This way we'll know more about what options to put on the poll, and you'll have a chance to try out the changes and fixes that come with R89, and make your decision based on more information.
This means we no longer have a specific decision deadline date (and moving during Spring Break isn't feasible anymore, no matter what happens), but our revised plan is to get a poll up for you within a week after Livejournal Release 89 goes live, and give you at least 5 days to vote in it. Once that poll closes, we'll start totaling up opinions and get back to you ASAP with the final decision and discussion of how we're going to Make It Work. (If anyone knows Tim Gunn's cell number, he is totally invited to that post. FH needs all the silver-foxed help it can get.)
Questions? Comments? Suggestions? We're all ears. Except for Lainey, who's all toes.
Like we said back in the Open Forum, though, while we still hope we can stay with LJ, your admin critters don't want to be them, so we want to keep you up to date with what we've been doing and thinking.
We've been gathering as much LJ-based information as we can by tracking comments in the existing
news and lj_releases posts, new posts in the changelog community, and also joining the Russian language beta, lj_ru_beta. Sadly there's a very limited amount of news we can glean from those last two, for technical reasons with changelog and language reasons with the other. (Huge, huge thanks to taseredagod for helping us post feedback there by translating it into Russian so the techs could understand it.) We've also been keeping up on the changes made at Dreamwidth; we're happy to let you know that they've now set things up so that imported comments can be "claimed" and attached to the owner's Dreamwidth journal. So if a move does happen, you'll be able to fix all those Open ID comments in old threads, and automagically put the icons back so everything is pretty again. (As long as the player is still around to do that for their old/current character journals.)
In the OF, we said the plan was to announce a decision about LJ vs. Somewhere Else by February 19th, with a poll beforehand (unless things at LJ got so very fixed that staying seemed a foregone conclusion). We're still planning on a poll, and we're still not going anywhere if the majority of players vote to stay. We do, however, need to shift those dates a bit, due to some hopefully-good news.
Up until yesterday, after several delays where it seemed like info was about to come out from LJ and then it didn't, our intent was to put that poll up for you on the 16th. (And extend the decision deadline by a few days so you'd have more time to vote.)
However, while the company was busy touting its new LJ Media community program instead of saying anything about fixing the problems from the recent release, one of the volunteers let us know that the non-Cyrillic Beta version of Release 89 just went live for the staff and high-level volunteers, and it does include the long-promised classic comments style.
It seems to be tied to Minimalism (aka the S2 style that most of us are using right now) in a way that might mean we'd still be limited in our journal designs to an extent -- we don't know the details beyond the phrasing of the tweets the volunteer made. If so, though, there are a lot of Minimalism designs to choose from (around 40 just from LJ, plus any customized layouts that users have created) so it could still be a pretty workable option for all of us, if Classic Comments are available for all Minimalism layouts.
With this in mind, we're expecting/hoping that Release 89 will go public sometime next week, and we'd like to hold off on polling the game about staying or moving until after that happens. This way we'll know more about what options to put on the poll, and you'll have a chance to try out the changes and fixes that come with R89, and make your decision based on more information.
This means we no longer have a specific decision deadline date (and moving during Spring Break isn't feasible anymore, no matter what happens), but our revised plan is to get a poll up for you within a week after Livejournal Release 89 goes live, and give you at least 5 days to vote in it. Once that poll closes, we'll start totaling up opinions and get back to you ASAP with the final decision and discussion of how we're going to Make It Work. (If anyone knows Tim Gunn's cell number, he is totally invited to that post. FH needs all the silver-foxed help it can get.)
Questions? Comments? Suggestions? We're all ears. Except for Lainey, who's all toes.