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?

Apparently something LJ did in a recent update ended up re-introducing the "long threads break the page" bug for certain styles. (Thanks for the heads-up, glacial_queen.) Unfortunately, the custom commenting styles that whateverknight generously designed for us are among those, so this is both a player note for those of you using them on your character journals, and a gamewide note that we've changed the comms back over to Minimalism themes with LJ's Custom Comments turned on.

You probably don't need to change your character journals to a different style unless you've got posts in them with super long threads that are breaking -- fixing the comms should cover most of the issue. If you do want to change to a different style, though, your options for keeping subject headers are limited to Minimalism, or switching the LJ default comments back on, since there's finally an option for subject headers in those.

In conclusion, ( here is a puppy. )

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.)

Our provider was having some technical issues earlier, so the fandomhigh account was momentarily out of service. We're up again now! The regular e-mail address (administration at fandomhigh dot net) and the website should be working correctly. If you sent us e-mail or submitted an application through the website anytime between 2 pm EST on Monday and midnight, though, you'll need to re-send it.

Which y'all were I'm sure aware of despite the complete lack of announcement in any official community or to the English-speaking world; luckily there was a "Switch the heck back" link provided. (Which, alongside personal frazzledness, was why I didn't make an OOC post about it when it happened.)

There's not a lot of further information from LJ, but there is a feedback post, finally, and it's here. (In news. I know, I can't contain my shock that they've actually decided to use the News community for news again, either. I thought it had been eaten by goats.)

There is a new homepage; it is ugly and prioritizes flashy links to crap we don't need to know, but doesn't have much effect on RP aside from its contribution to general irritation with the world, which frankly there's plenty of already today, thxbutnothx.

Thus ends my report.

Probably because it's a relatively tiny update.

You can now get Pingback notifications anytime someone uses your LJ username in a public post, in addition to the existing "anytime someone links to your post." It's opt-in and can be adjusted in settings.

Statistics for paid/perm users can now show you traffic info for individual entries.

A handful of bug-fixes that aren't any of the biggies that plague RPers.

Some goats you won't want to punch.

Now from home where I can actually a) log in and b) do so on a browser that is not IE8. This day, you guise. This day.

So Release 101 is out, the highlights of which are:

∅ The new-style compose/edit page is now the only one we have access to.

♥ Various bug fixes to the profile page and the aforementioned compose/edit page.

♥ Additional customization options for the new-style friends feed:

    ♠♠♠ You can set a background image for the page, or a background color. (To set the color, delete the default image first.)

    ♠♠♠ You can set a background color for the entry headers. (Not limited to just the colors shown; click the far right box to get a hex color-picker.)

    ♠♠♠ You can turn off infinite scroll and set the number of entries to show per page. (And it will actually listen to you.)

    ∅ You can't, at this point, set a header image, change the text/link colors, or the background of the entries themselves. (I suggested all of those as must-haves here, in addition to keeping our links lists.)

That is all I have, aside from booze and/or ice cream, which I will happily share with anyone who needs it.

LJ-Releases post

Two items of note for this one:

• A new profile page layout has gone live, with the option to switch back and forth between that and the old version until some unspecified date. It's not vastly different, but does have the ubiquitous blue gradient and wasted whitespace, as well as shifting the interests above the bio (the cry of 'WTF why' went up the world round) and Vgifts to the bottom, and changing the way friends/friend-of, etc. are displayed.





• The ability to switch back and forth between the old and new version of the Compose/Edit page (introduced back in September) will disappear sometime next week, with everyone now having to use the new version.

This is Kermit T. Frog reporting for Sesame Street LJ/FH News, and that's all I got.

In non-LJ news, today is the last day to sign up for a potential new roomie from among next term's new characters (or other oldbies who want a randomly-assigned roomie), so get those in if you need to!

Hi, folks.

We spam the OOC comm interrupt your rare non-event weekend to bring you an unfortunately not so rare update on unhelpful Livejournal shenanigans.

Though this wasn't announced in any of the official release notes, we've discovered that the ability to add or remove friends via the admin console -- the heart of FH's friending-list system -- has recently been removed. (Those particular commands are now only available to LJ staff.)

vanillajello filed a support ticket to find out if it was intentional and/or permanent, and the answer we got back from staff was this: "Due to rampant abuse, it is no longer possible to add friends using the admin console. Though it causes an inconvenience for people that were using it legitimately, the level and frequency of the abuse was such that we had no choice but to disable it for everyone. I apologize for the inconvenience."

While it's not hard to see how the function could have been a gateway for crush-confessing spambots, and the number of people who used it the way FH does was probably pretty small, it is going to be an inconvenience for us as a game.

Until a more solid solution is found, unfortunately new character journals will need to be added to your friendslists manually. Not a huge deal for established journals who have most of the game friended already, but for the new characters themselves, who'll need to friend everyone, it's going to be a lot of clicking.

To make things as easy as we can for now, we've created a formatted version of the master friending list, where clicking on the link for each name will take you directly to the "Add this friend" page. It's under the cut, and we'll also add it to the main entry for the friending list that's linked from the FH profile.

( Master Friending List, The Clicky Version )

LJ Releases | News | Summaries of machine-translated Russian News and Igrick posts

( Minor Changes )
( The Big Kahuna )

If you've got goat-punching needs, we're here -- though I personally would suggest wearing gloves, since the goat is clearly suffering from some form of dementia this time, and who knows if the source is congenital or communicable.

[News post | LJ Releases post]

The Good:

Scrapbook (whatever one's opinion may be on the new setup) now offers 1 GB of space to free users.

The Thing Where I'm Just Going To Listen To Your Complaints And Nod Unless I Can Actually Help:

The updated version of the New/Edit Entry page (which I mentioned briefly last month is live for all to test and play with. In a shocking move for Livejournal staff, it's still in beta mode. For now (no info on when that will change), you can switch back and forth between the old and new versions, and LJ staff invites bug reports and general feedback on both the News and LJ Releases posts.

Here's some (full-size) images of the pages, for those who don't feel like going into their own journals and experimenting right now:

Old Entry Form | New Entry Form

Aside from the general visual differences, the big changes seem to be:

* The icon selector (visual, not text, like the new comments style) -- the issues there are pretty obvious and the same ones that exist with default comment pages. There's a way around this, though: a "Light" version of the new form, accessible by adding ?format=light to the end of the update page URL. (This only works if you've switched to the new format, of course.) It isn't terribly different from the non-light version, but does give you a drop-down text icon selector instead of the visual.

* A few option boxes getting shuffled around to different places.

* The big text box itself, which will now stretch downward as you type, once you've put in more text than the initial size would show. To scroll, you just use the browser's scrollbar, rather than dealing with a second one inside the entry box. (Some users have reported that if you enter enough text, it stops expanding downward and you have to use the arrow keys or mouse clicking to get around inside the entry box, but I haven't managed to enter enough text to make that happen. After pasting in the entirety of a fic that I know exceeds the character limit of a post, I still hadn't managed to make it happen, so it seems unlikely to be a frequent issue.)

*The tag selector - actually looks pretty useful in theory, since it pops up a neatly alphabetized list, but right now there's a bug being reported that any tags that start with a character that's not a letter or a number don't show up. (So basically Katchoo is @#$!$%^%$^%$*&*&-ing @@%&^%-ed.) That one will presumably get fixed, since it's a straightforward bug and not a design issue. ETA: fixed!

That's all I gots, for the moment; I'm sure more will crop up as people discover things that do or don't work.

Since this happened last week while I was off in San Diego (drink it in; it always goes down smooth); it's probably not a revelation to most of you, but just for posterity and the glory of The LiveJournal Tag:

News | Releases

Fixes We Might Care About

* Timestamps on custom comments pages no longer show in UTC (unless your journal is actually set to that), yay!

* Collapsed subject lines on custom comments pages no longer say "no subject," yay!

* No more redirects to the login page for public posts, yay!

* Spell-check works, yay!

* All journal types can make polls now, yay! (Which is more just a freebie improvement than a fix, but whatever.)

* CAPTCHA finally turns off when you tell it to, yay!


Bugs We Might Care About

....The Rich Text Editor continues to suck, and so does the userpic selector on the default style comment pages? Neither of these are really new, LJ, though congrats on finding additional ways to temporarily break them and then kind of fixing them but not completely, I guess.

Other

* The Lost Girl cast and crew refer to the power displayed in this icon as The Super-Suck.

* When rehearsing Bo's chi-draining encounters, the absent visual effects get summarized as "aaaaand then suckysuckysucky..."

Neither of these are relevant but they make brat_inslayage cackle amusingly, and I've had that kind of morning.

Rhetorical question; sadly I've lived here long enough to know the answer.

In news you actually care about, the website is up, and it did turn out to be just a page-replace thing, so e-mail was never down. Everything's been restored from yesterday's backup, nothing's been lost because we haven't changed anything between then and now, and I need Tylenol and all the coffee.

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.

With Prom coming up tomorrow, we've been doing some detective work on when, where and how the Classic and (other) Custom comments break pages, and putting together our best suggestions on how to avoid it. This is a "for now" thing, of course; should LJ fix the pagebreaking issues, we'll let everybody know ASAP.

Here's what we've discovered: as long as you don't let any individual thread -- one single line of back and forth replies counting from the top-level reply to the post (aka the OCD header) -- reach 100 comments, you won't break the page.

So, to make big posts like Prom and the picnics work:

When a thread gets to around 90 comments (or fewer if you want to be extra-cautious), do 1 of 2 things

• Move the conversation to someone's character journal, and end the comm thread with a link over to the personal post



• Stay in the comm post, but
  
  
  • Go back and reply to the third comment in the thread -- in other words, not the OCD header and not the anchor comment of the first character in the conversation (because other people might have replied to that too and you don't want their subthreads to interrupt yours)
  
  
  
  • Branch off from there with a "Continued from..." link, and start counting toward 90 again
  
  
  
  • Also make sure you add one more "Continued over here..." comment to the end of the previous subthread so everything's linked up!
  
  

If we pull that off, we can have threads that look like this, and pages that look like this without anything getting busticated!

(The screened comments are saving your sanity from the creepypasta I was posting when I got bored with replying YOUR FACE to myself.)

This has been tested in both Firefox and Chrome, and on the Classic Comments (which all the FH comms are in) as well as custom comments for Smooth Sailing, Flexible Squares, and Expressive -- so you should be able to use the same strategy to avoid breaking pages in your personal posts too.

__

As a related note, we're going to put up a resource post soonish on the different types of comment styles and how to enable them, the issues with them, and so on, linking up the stuff we've already posted in bits and pieces. We'll also include a discussion section for people to describe what they're using and either ask for help or offer it. It'll take a little while to pull it together, especially with this weekend keeping everyone busy, but it's on the horizon!

Also special thanks to longislandiceme for taking his shirt off FOR SCIENCE, and yes, I totally want to do Pixelated Naughty Bits day for realz sometime so we can have Equal Opportunity Shirtlessness.

...is live. There's no news post for it yet, but the lj_releases post is now up. We don't know all the changes it brings, bad or good, but what we do know is this:

If you have a Paid or Plus account (at this point it doesn't work for Basic, but we don't know if that will change because see above per staff, that's a bug and will be fixed), then

1. Go here and pick any of the Minimalism styles. At least some of them are available for all account types.

2. Click "Apply Theme"

3. Scroll to the bottom and click "Customize Selected Theme"

4. Under Basic Options, make sure "Disable customized comment pages for your journal" is set to No

5. Scroll down to the first line under Additional Options and set "Show old style Entry page" to Yes

6. Click "Save changes"

7. Profit!!! Old-style comment pages!!! (Which have already been applied to the FH comms.)

To view all comment pages automatically in your chosen style, go to Settings and check "View all journals and communities in my own style." (If you prefer to see the original journal and community layouts and just want to manually force the comments to your style, leave that setting unchecked and just append "?style=mine" to the end of the URL for any comment page you're reading.)

We'll keep passing information on to you as we put things together ourselves, but this one seemed like something worth letting you know ASAP.

__

( ETA/Ongoing: Bugs, Fixes, and new info as it comes )

If your comments page just suddenly reverted to the Default of Evil, it's because LJ made a bork that flipped everyone's "disable custom comments" box to Yes, en masse. To fix it, just go here and flip it back to No.

Hi, folks. We have some breaking news for you, so hold on to your mountie hats: Livejournal has worse design, usability, and customer service than Portalocity!

It's a shock to us, too, so we'll give you a minute to get your breath back.

Right, on to the pertinent information: LJ rolled out their new sitewide comments page in the middle of the night last night. This is the page you see if you have custom comment pages turned off -- like almost every RPer on LJ -- or if you're not logged in at all.

The new version, though it has a few new useful features, also breaks the heck out of comment organization and makes RP as we do it almost impossible. (It also screws up anonmemes/kinkmemes, among other fannish pursuits.)

( Problems )

( Workarounds for Now )

( The FUTURE (imaginary sparkletext) )

In conclusion...

We hate this too. We're as frustrated with the update as you are, and we'll keep doing the best we can to make things work. We welcome your thoughts, questions, and suggestions!

[And now the floor, she is open!]