Location Poll Results and FH Plans

[nookiepowered]

Hail, Fellow Fandomites!

Time to catch up with the results of the location poll that closed at the end of Saturday night: the final tally was 21 to 12 in favor of remaining on Livejournal.*

While we know that's not exactly unanimous (and wish fervently that there were a solution on which we could all agree unanimously), it is the preference of the majority, which is what we feel it's best to work with for now. If things get seriously bad on LJ in the future, we'll definitely re-assess the situation.

We're going to be doing our best to keep the game up to date on official repairs and user workarounds to the problems we've all been experiencing, as well as anything less helpful that might be coming at us. We'll keep posting news and updates here, so watch for the livejournal tag (or stalk it, if you'd like a heads-up in your inbox).

We also know (boy howdy) that the status quo isn't ideal, and we absolutely understand if it's just not workable for you. However, we'd hate to lose any of our players, so if there's anything we can do to help make Livejournal bearable -- changes to community designs, setting up new OOC processes to avoid the problems, working up tutorials, or things we haven't thought of at all, please talk to us about it, either here in the suggestions thread, or at any time by e-mail!

__

* (And the average fear-level induced by Frank the weeping goat is 10 out of 10. I am only sorry that I had already created the poll before I thought to make the top of the range 11 while leaving the label "On a scale of 1 to 10...")

Comments

Questions

[nookiepowered]

For the admininators.

Suggestions

[nookiepowered]

For the admins or for ways to make play work better for everyone.

Re: Suggestions

[oncourtandstage.livejournal.com]

Technical question to which I hope someone in the game has the answer!

I have half a tutorial written up for using off-site icons in comments -- which will help a lot of us who don't want to give LJ any more money but still want all the icons we can dream of -- but I'm stuck on finding a way to float images in LJ comments, since it disallows the style attribute.

So. Any suggestions for that, anyone? :D

Re: Suggestions

[likes_scoundrels]

Define "float"? Not sure what you mean but that could be the allergy meds making me too dopey. ;)

Re: Suggestions

[nookiepowered]

*tests*

Here's some text that's long enough to wrap around the image so we can see what the hell happens and whether Livejournal will even acknowledge the space and vspace attributes, which it should, since they're html, not CSS, but since when has that ever stopped them?

Ponies are cute and adorable (unless you have to clean up after them.) I like ponies a lot, but cats are more fun to snuggle with and tend to clean up after themselves. Granted they're not very useful as transportation unless you're in a certain Sylvester McCoy Doctor Who episode, but let's face it, this paragraph is mostly filler anyway.

Re: Suggestions

[nookiepowered]

Test results:

You can use align=left inside the image tag, but LJ won't recognize the hspace=attribute, so you get the text snuggled right up against the right side of the image.

To get yourself some whitespace, do:

<table align=left><tr><td width=110><img src="[ICON URL]" width=100 height=100></td></tr></table>[YOUR TEXT HERE]

which gives the result

[YOUR TEXT HERE]

THEN USE <br clear=all> SO YOU DON'T GET STUPID WRAPPING BENEATH, SIGH.

Re: Suggestions

[nookiepowered]

So

<table align=left><tr><td width=110><img src="[ICON URL]" width=100 height=100></td></tr></table>[YOUR TEXT HERE] <br clear=all>

Re: Suggestions

[izzyalienqueen.livejournal.com]

Can everyone make sure to change their journal style to the classic comments?

There's been a few journals where I've clicked in to read extended threads and for the life of me, I can't get the expand function to work. It's not a browser issue because it happens in both Firefox & Chrome.

Re: Suggestions

[likes_scoundrels]

There's a slight problem with that in that long threads eat the threads below it. They just vanish. See here -- under Raven's thread with Karla, there's a whole long Karla/Warren thread that's just gone.

And no, that didn't make me giggle. What gave you that idea?

Re: Suggestions

[wasthecuteone]

This, please. I still cannot comment in Firefox using the default comment form. Still. And no, it's not some add-on, I have disabled every add-on I have five times over trying to see if maybe this time that would work.

And with AU kids weekend coming up, it seems like people using journals they're not able to force everything to display in their own style with is going to be a lot bigger problem than it has been.

Re: Suggestions

[need-no-moon.livejournal.com]

Okay so, I feel kind of an ass saying this when people seem to have loading issues but... I honestly do not like the classic comments at all. The whole not staying in one thread thing makes me run far and wide. It's the reason why I've been avoiding the comms, to be honest.

So... I don't know. I don't want to shut people out from tagging in a post I make, but neither do I want to revert my lj back to a style with issues that make me *loathe* tagging.

Re: Suggestions

[furnaceface]

Out of curiosity- I'm one of those people who hasn't changed to the classic comments, because I can't stand the only LJ journal style that supports them. I need my Flexible Squares. I need them to live.

That said, the new comment pages still give me headaches/eyestrain (and as an animator, I kind of need those eyeballs), so I generally just turn on the custom comment pages to get a comment page version of what I see when I load my friendlist. It's kind of clunky, and LJ loves to push second and third threads off the page and devour them forever, but it doesn't cause me physical hurt.

But now I'm wondering if the expand function on the custom comment pages is broken, or if this is just another side-effect of LJ's new, default migraine-deluxe ones. Haaalp?

Re: Suggestions

[hurtingzeebo]

I have one for the admins on the game wide comms: can you set the Nav strip to "Always show on my journal/community"? I access the game through a portable version of a browser from work, and thanks to memory constraints on both the portable browser and on my work computer, using a plugin to swap logins ends up slowing down my whole system and not being terribly workable, so I have to log in and out of journals manually. The nav stip really helps make that more workable, but at present when I log out of my journal, it vanishes, and I have to click around to get to a screen where I can log in again.

Re: Suggestions

[nookiepowered]

I was planning to do that anyway (much as I used to hate the navstrip) because it works as a half-assed substitute for the regular header bar, since the Classic Comments don't have that. So definitely, yes.

Re: Suggestions

[nookiepowered]

(Though I think you can also set that on your own journals, as "Always show on any journal/community I view.")

Re: Suggestions

[glacial_queen]

Can we get a general idea of what options are available for comments? It seems like everyone has an issue with one or more of the options and it's getting to the point where I hardly know what my journal is using anymore, never mind if it's the least annoying/most useful for any given subset of people.

So, as far as I can tell, (and I can be completely wrong, because this whole thing has me tearing out my hair in frustration), our options are:

*LJ's new default, which lets us have long threads but no subject headers, coloration can be migraine triggers, and the new icon browser-thingy (that's the technical term for it, trufax).

*Custom comments, which break, jump backwards to the beginning of the post when comments get added, and lose long threads.

*Classic comments, which work like s1 used to(?), but have other pros/cons?

I admit, I haven't swapped back to classic, mostly because it seems like a lot of work to get my f-list to look like something I'm not happy with and I don't know if/how to make it do the things I want anyway. But I figured I'd ask the People Whut Know About This Stuff, so I can decide what to switch to and how to get it as close to functional for me and everyone else that I can.

So, I ask you--what kind of comments are you using? Pros? Cons? How does it compare to the other options? Are there more comment types than the ones I've listed? Sorry to make you go over old ground, but...Help?

Re: Suggestions

[unburnt-queen.livejournal.com]

A minor note that I don't think has been brought up - I can't access things in the new comment style on my phone. Maybe it's different for other people, but I always have to style=mine it just to comment.

So I guess that's a con, on my end -- honestly, probably the biggest one I've noticed.

Re: Suggestions

[nookiepowered]

Classic comments have all the same negatives as Custom comments, plus they're only available for the Minimalism style. On the plus side, they look like S1 used to, and work like S1 used to except for ... see above re: break, jump backwards, and lose long threads.

The 4th option is what Jara's doing, which is using LJ's default, but with Stylish and Greasemonkey scripts that fix most of the negatives including subject headers, icon browser, etc. The drawback to that is that those are browser-dependent and have to be installed on every computer separately, so if you're reading from work or a library, (or, thanks Erin, your phone) etc., you're not going to have them.

I'm using Classic Comments and this workaround to read my own flist in my chosen style rather than the Minimalism it's technically set to, but that trick only works for paid accounts.

I have my fingers crossed that this particular trunk of the LJ Changelog means they're working on the break/jump backwards/lose long threads issues for custom and classic comments, since that's what "S2 comments pages" refers to. ("S1 comments pages" are what they call the default style, no matter how many changes they make to it.)

Re: Suggestions

[whateverknight.livejournal.com]

The thing that it seems the LJ people are trying to obfuscate as much as possible is that "classic comments" ARE just custom comments. All they did was crap out a kludge to the Minimalism layout that makes its custom comments look like the old comments did. You still need to use style=mine to see them on other journals, etc.

General Discussion

[nookiepowered]

For... what it says. Goat-punching can also go here.

Re: General Discussion

[willbethenight.livejournal.com]

I'll have the PowerPoint ready for any future extreme examples of LJ being dumb.

THE DREAM OF FH LARP HAS NOT ENDED.

Also, thank you guys for all of your hard work, especially over the past few months. It can't be easy, but you're doing great.

Re: General Discussion

[momslilassassin]

AHAHAHA. I didn't vote in the poll because I couldn't see anything...because I'd adblocked the weeping goat picture months ago. A WINNER IS ME.

Re: General Discussion

[likes_scoundrels]

Me too! \o/

Re: General Discussion

[glacial_queen]

Kind of building off my request in the suggestions thread, I was thinking, we might want to figure out some kind of comment standardization option as a game and come up with simple instructions that we all follow so that we're all on the same page, pun intended. I know there's not going to be one simple commenting solution that pleases everyone, but I think we're going to have to find SOMETHING.

As far as I can see it, our problem can be summed up like this: 1) Some people legitimately have issues commenting and threading. 2) This game is made up of commenting and threading, so people who cannot do this cannot participate in the game. 3) We need to figure out HOW to fix this problem for everyone, because it isn't fair to the people who can't comment, at least if we want them to continue to play in this game.

I think a standardized commenting system is the best way to do this, but I'm sure there are other possibilities out there. Suggestions? Ideas? Anything?

OOC

[nookiepowered]

For avoiding accusations of extreme nihilism.