Fandom High OOC

Hi, folks!

Our poll on tag formatting yielded:

Put it back the way it was: 3
Keep it the way it is: 3
IDGAF, but CLICKY!: 9

Conclusion: clicky.

But seriously, since it was a tie and since we've spent the polling period looking for alternatives that would best serve both types of users, what we've come up with is ( this... )

Things what will happen:

• I'll post a heads-up once everything's converted, so you'll be able to hit the tags pages and see what the current tags actually look like.



• We'll link this sucker up on the FH Index page and in the sidebars of the two comms so nobody has to memorize the format; you can just come here and check the table.



• We'll also add a thread to the "Hey Teachers And Townies, Where Do You Live And Do You Have Business Changes" post the next time it goes up (after new characters have come aboard), specifically asking if business owners need to change the tag for their business.

Questions, comments, suggestions, things we didn't think of that mean we'll need to revise this plan, which we're happy to do?

They haven't posted an actual formal, numbered Release in ages; this stuff just comes through in dribs and drabs in News posts, so I've only been giving y'all the heads-up here if it seems like something that might affect our playing experience.

Today's updates:

Mobile View -- otherwise known as Tiny Phone Internets -- will now display individual journals (not just your friends page) in the Mobile style, instead of whatever your chosen style is. You can make your journal go back to showing in your own style on the Settings/Display page under Mobile View. For paid/perm accounts, this means everyone will see your style when they look at your journal. For free accounts, you'll see it, but everyone else still sees Mobile View. This is only likely to impact people who RP by phone a lot, and even for them, probably won't really change the experience of replying to individual pings.

Mass comment deletion -- Now when you delete a comment in your own post, LJ will ask you if you also want to delete every comment that person has made in that post, or every comment they've ever made in that journal. (In comms, that option will only appear for maintainers/mods.) Spiffy for controlling spam and flamers in RL journals, but please don't use it in your character journals, since we don't want to end up deleting other people's past character interactions. (It's turned off by default, so you have to check a box to make it happen.)

Release 118 came out while I still in SDCC recovery mode, so I missed linking it at the time. It didn't really do anything that affects RP besides tweaking the Manage Userpics page layout a bit on the new site-scheme, and fixing an error message bug related to screened comments.

Release 118.2 adds some important things like said Manage Userpics page back to the main menu navigation on the new site-scheme, and users who delete their accounts now have 60 days to change their minds instead of 30. They've also switched the LJ search from Yandex to Google, which in theory could be a vast improvement, but so far is kind of a step down due to the inability to sort results.

And now the weather.

*The option to use either the new style friends feed OR your own custom friends page design that matches your journal will be permanent

*In the standard site comment pages, Subject Lines are back up in the header bar of the comment where they belong

*Text in comment boxes is now black instead of gray

*If you choose to use the new-style friends feed, your Link List is now one of the options for sidebar widgets

Other stuff like bug fixes, a bit about things they're working on for the future, and of course the discussion, is here.

(The subtitle of this post is a direct quote from one of the replies to the announcement.)

news has announced that the staff are reviving the lj_feedback community as a place to garner user feedback before rolling out changes. BRB, checking my pulse.

The first post over in lj_feedback, meanwhile, is asking for user opinions on the desire for and possible functioning of a Like/+1 system for posts and/or comments. (My personal feedback on it is there, fwiw.)

LJ Release 112 consists of some fixes to the photo uploader (for Rich Text Format posts and comments, not Scrapbook), and two new premium styles. Also known as "Pretty much nothing that affects us, Praise The Kraken" and there literally is no matching news post.

Now there is tag merging, praise the Kraken and pass the krill. The end.


*fixes every freaking instance of "devils nest" vs "devil's nest' "

News | LJ Releases

Aside from some bug fixes, the two major changes here are:

* Community maintainers can now get pingbacks when one of their communities is mentioned in a post. Yes, fellow admins, I turned that off for all the FH communities so none of us will get pingback spammed every time somebody linkdrops.

* It's now possible for community maintainers to create and post to custom filters within their communities. There's a default "all maintainers" group, or we can create a group manually from the list of member usernames, just like you do when making your friend groups for personal journals.

We don't have any immediate plans for that function, but it may end up being useful for coordinating NPC players for fighty posts, pre-playing BDE scenes without having to hide the post in someone's personal journal, and getting all the OCD set up in big game/OOC posts before they get made public.

Not a terribly goat-punchy update this time! Though I suppose saying that is basically inviting plague of weeping ruminants. Here, have an OOC thread to stave off the Frankopolypse.

- LJ-releases post -

Aside from some bugfixes (and one that hasn't yet been fixed that involves displaying incorrect totals for friends/mutual friends/communities on the profile page), this update basically consists of

1. The new-style profile page is permanent now

2. The new-style Friends Feed has more customizations:

-------A minimalist "Light" version is available

-------You can now edit the "Entries feed for" part of the page title. It will still end in your username, though. (So instead of "Entries feed for nookiepowered," it will display "Friends page of nookiepowered" or "People who have not yet been devoured by nookiepowered" etc.)

-------If new entries show up on the main friends page while you're paging back to skip=[whatever], a little button with the number of new entries on it will appear in the row of tabs on the right side. because going back and refreshing the main flist after backreading isn't something we all do instinctively anyway...

And I believe that's all! As always, open for your goat-abusing pleasure.

LJ Releases post.

This update is mostly changes to the beta version of the new Friends Feed, which is still optional at this time:

♠ On the Customize page, you can now set the font to small/standard/large, and the scrolling to "pages" or infinite. Right now "pages" = 20 posts per page on the flist no matter what you have set in your journal preferences; astronewt is checking to see whether that's going to be the standard or if it will eventually match our journal settings.

♠ Entries now have a "change" link next to the tags, if your journal has the permissions to edit tags on that post.

♠ Friendsfriends now works on the new feed style.

♠ Friends-only posts and posts with a tighter filter now use the same icon.*

Stuff that's not about the Friends page design:

♣ There are some new styles available (only for journals, not the friendslist) that are paid-only, as in you pay specifically to have that style. They're not doing away with custom styles or anything apocalyptic like that; these are basically just extra options aimed at the "I am a popular blogger and I treat my LJ like it's my personal web brand, give me something fancy so I can sell page views" set.

♣ The new profile page now displays/doesn't display community memberships to match your settings for "show/hide my friend-of list."

Post is, as always, open for your goat-punching, caroling, and gingerbread-baking needs.

__

*Because God knows I wouldn't want the people I trusted with my filtered post to know they're on a filter. Instead they should think it's okay to discuss the contents willynilly with everyone on my friendslist. This is not me being mystified by LJ for once, because this change was made due to user complaints, for no reason I can fathom.

LJ Releases (There's no news post yet, but judging from recent releases, when there is one, it'll probably just be a link to the lj_releases post.)

( New Stuffs )
( Fixed Stuffs )
( Stuffs They Broke While Trying To Fix Stuffs )

S'all I got, for the moment!

astronewt has made a new post in lj_releases clarifying some (certainly not all) of the questions and issues surrounding the new Friends page design.

It's short, so it's probably more helpful to just go there and read it, as well as the discussions in the comments, but major things that probably need pointing out are

* An option to turn off Infinite Scroll will be added before the beta period is over.

* Some customization options -- "at least text size and background images" -- will be added before the beta period is over.

* The mentions people have seen via Russian-language news of Paid Accounts going away refer to an eventual change in the pricing structure that will make all of the current Paid features available as separate a la carte options:

"This will involve changing things so users have a standard LiveJournal account to which they then can add the paid/extra features that they want separately (or feature packages/sets). The concept of buying something that's called a "paid account" is what will be removed -- extra features will be done as add-ons and add-on packages. Existing paid or permanent accounts at that time will be treated as premium/elite accounts that will have access to even more features than exist right now. "

So that particular thing might end up being an improvement, depending on the pricing structure -- you'd end up only paying for the options you want.

Also, Happy Halloweeeeeeen. Boo.

This one actually hit very late Monday night, as I'm sure everybody discovered on their own, but things have been a wee bit busy in the House of 1000 Cats this week, so this is the first chance I've had to write it up.

There's no news post this time, just the LJ Releases post.

Aside from some changes to how Scrapbook galleries are ordered (most recently uploaded appear first), the only major change is the big, honking obvious one:

LJ-Cuts, when left-clicked, now open right on your Friends page, instead of taking you to the entry page. Once they're opened, a "collapse" link appears at the spot where the cut text was, so you can close it again if so desired.

To ignore this change entirely and never see an expanded cut-tag on your friendslist, you can

1. Right-click the cut-tag and open page in another tab or window. (For a tablet, long-pressing on the link will bring up the right-click menu in Firefox/Opera/etc. The default Android phone browser, notsomuch, but Option 2 still works.)
   



2. Left-click on the subject line, the comments link, or the permanent "Link" to open the full entry in the same tab/window.

TL;DR: It's a tad unsettling, but it can be avoided.

Thass all I gots! As always, feel free to share if you've got other workarounds, problems you've noticed with the change that aren't mentioned here, ponies, cake, or pie.

LJ Release 96 is live. I don't like to let these go by without pointing them out just in case some weird bug pops up, but this seems to be a pretty tiny update, RPishly speaking.

1. A bunch of stuff about the new Scrapbook system that basically seems to be improvements, but doesn't directly affect RP.

2. If you're using the default comments style, which most of us aren't, they've tweaked the script so that when you navigate to the next page of comments, it doesn't need to reload the actual entry, just the comments section, so it's a tiny bit faster.

One other thing to be aware of is that LJ is beta-testing the redesigned version of the page for creating/editing entries, which will be laid out a lot like the redesigned default comments pages. (Though hopefully it won't mess with some users' browsers the way the comments style does, since the entry form is a lot less code-filled than a comments page.)

That beta-testing is running separately from the release 95/96/97 etc. system, and you can read about it and offer feedback over here. In Russian, because that's helpful to the other 93% of Livejournal account-holders*.

*Per LJ demographics -- if you assume everyone in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus speaks Russian, that's still only 7% of total account-holders.

To your regularly scheduled Umbridge-free FH comms, in Smooth Sailing style so we once again have our useful links down the side, which means the comment-pages for all the comms are now in whateverknight's version of Classic Comments, instead of LJ's minimalism ones.

Big thanks to all of you for running with this BDE so creatively, and to umbitch for one last spree of cackling pink evil before we took her down!

Livejournal Release 93 is live (News || LJ Releases) and this is your faithful reporter, Kermit T. Frog, providing your usual summary of the New, the Old, and the WTF.

( Whoops )
( Changes that don't really affect FH )
( NOW IS THE TIME ON SPROCKETS WHEN WE DANCE )
( Still Unfixed )

And that's all I got!

...Well, that and Party In The USA stuck in my head.

News Post | LJ Releases Post

Livejournal's been working on switching to a new photohosting platform for a long time now; this is for once a case of fixing something that really was at least semi-broken, what with security setting and login issues galore in the original version. This one has better multi-picture upload capabilities and general management, it looks like.

It's also, for once and shockingly, LJ telling us before something goes live.

( What we know: )

So that's what we've got right now: the new system sure isn't perfect either, but *crosses fingers* it should hopefully be a relatively seamless change, beyond driving the OCD-ridden among us crazy with the need to re-arrange galleries.

Please consider this entire post to be a universe-preserving OOC thread / open-season on goats.

Good Morning, Fandom! It's time for another round of our favorite livejournal game, Good News, Bad News!

Livejournal Release 91 is live: News | LJ Releases.

Good News

* The "multiple keywords = default icon" bug in the default comment style has been fixed. Sort of.

* Thread expansion should be working better... in the default comment style.

Neutral News

Otherwise known as "This doesn't affect FH but we're noting it for you just in case you use it elsewhere."

* Community moderators can now edit the tags of posts while they're in the moderating queue, before they go live. (FH doesn't moderate posts, so n/a for us.)

* Posts that have been approved from said moderating queue (which FH doesn't use) will now have a little stamp showing which mod approved them, in the default comment style (which FH comms don't use).

Bad News

* No fixes for any existing custom/classic comment issues yet.

* That fix for "multiple keywords=default" was accomplished by LJ removing all alternate keywords from your options in the default style only except the one that comes first alphabetically. No big deal for the visual browser since you see the picture anyway, but if you're using the Stylish script that gives you back a dropdown text list, all of those additional keywords will be missing from your list. (i.e. I have a (worksafe) icon whose keywords are "kink" and "porn" -- in default style with the Stylish script, "porn" is missing from the list.) This does not affect custom comment pages, which still show all keywords.

* Release 91 seems to have broken the Greasemonkey script that fixes the comment entry box to give you back the opportunity to add a subject line. LJ's not likely to fix that, since other people's scripts aren't their problem; it's highly likely that the author will put out an update, though. Again, this does not affect custom comment pages, just those using the default pages with scripts. ETA: Yup, that script has been updated - thanks for the heads up, Jara!

* All custom comment pages (including classic comments) are now displaying comment timestamps in UTC (Greenwich Mean Time) instead of your personal settings. That one's a bug LJ probably will fix, but we bring it up so you don't have to WTF like we did, and because it does affect custom comments, which includes the FH comms.

WDEK News

That stands for "We Don't Even Know."

* LJ has changed how LJ cuts display. They now look like this Your cut text here instead of like this: ( Your cut text here )

*Except it's not an image, it's a unicode symbol which means that it changes with your text size and some people whose browsers/computers don't display that symbol just see [] Your cut text here.

It looks okay in some styles and not quite so okay in others, but doesn't actually break anything. It's just some aesthetic WTFery, this who knows where it falls in the Good News, Bad News game.

( Actual Example, With Nothing Actually Hidden Behind It )

In conclusion, there is no goat-punching thread because that's what the whole post is for. There's only an OOC thread because it's Friday the 13th and we're not quite dumb enough to invite that kind of trouble.

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...")

Livejournal Release 90 is live! (And our ability to predict when that will happen is getting eerie.)

News post | LJ Releases post

( Things That Are Newly Broken )
( Things That Have Been Fixed )
( Things That Haven't Been Fixed (Yet) )
( Things That Aren't Going To Be Fixed )
( Things That Are Going Away )
( New Stuff That Is Actually Kind of Shiny, And How To Use It )
( What's Next for FH? )

[OCD up!]