More information on Friends feed, plus paid account information.

[astronewt]

This post is to provide some additional information on further updates that are yet to be made to the new Friends page feed, several of which address the biggest points of concern that have been expressed. I'm sorry that this 'what's yet to come' information wasn't in the post here yesterday, but we wanted to follow-up as quickly as we could to

Comments

[lied_ohne_worte]

I think many of these misunderstandings would be reduced if some form of communication to the English-speaking userbase could take place at the same time as things are being discussed on the Russian site - or more specifically, if informational entries could be made at the same time, and if people's questions and comments could be replied to here as well. It's not exactly the first time this happened, and one can't blame people for using machine translation if no one talks to them directly.

[burger]

I do have to agree with this. I'm glad we've got this post now, but the mass panic and google-translating that went on wouldn't have happened if we'd all been kept up to speed with these things at the same time as they were announced.

[n3m3sis42]

I third this. Paid separate options is something that could have been presented to us in English and it might have even been a thing a lot of people would like. I know for a long time people wanted to be able to purchase individual features. This could have been a positive instead of a freak out situation.

But thank you for listening and responding to the feedback about the friends page. I honestly didn't expect that and I really respect that you surprised me.

[trobadora]

Yes, exactly.

I'm sure that would be in everyone's best interest - after all, who wants lots of angry users shouting at them all the time when it could easily be avoided?

[slinkslowdown]

This update needs to be added to news where more people will see it.

I've made a post to suggestions, but it has yet to be approved or rejected, requesting that all posts made to lj-releases are also made to news, because compared to news, almost no one pays attention to this community. I also want this concern to be left here--a huge portion of this website's userbase isn't finding out about new features when they're implemented. If news also posted about new releases, there would be so much less confusion when things on LiveJournal change.

[dewline]

I'll second that suggestion. Seems like a good idea for averting future panics on our part before they start.

(Then again, seeing some of what's come up below...)

[marionnnette]

agreed

[aqualegia]

+1

[burger]

Those first two points are a huge relief, thank you. And MANY thanks for clarifying the situation on paid accounts -- I hope I'm not speaking too soon but being able to pick and choose which features you want to pay for sounds like quite a cool idea! (Hopefully this means moodthemes will be sticking around too :p)

The author of an entry will be able to select several comments that can be displayed along with the entry when it is viewed in friends feeds.
This seems like it might get a little messy, though.

[slinkslowdown]

Messy, perhaps, but in cases like the last release post it could help a lot. A staff comment could be chosen to be showed in the F-List feed and could clear up confusion.

[burger]

I agree that for official announcements and news posts it'll be handy (for example a staff member swooping in to say that paid accounts aren't going to be cancelled on the last post would have been great to show outside the entry) but I'm not sure I'd like it if every community or user on my feed did it. I suppose they probably won't bother, though.

[leaf_kunoichi]

Thank you for your response.

[rurik1]

The guy who wrote this text/this post, seems to possess a special gift .
The guy who wrote this post possess a gift of writing overcomplicated texts.

The specific manner in which he writes seems to be designed to make things less clear.

The way the sentences are build is overcomplicated !

look at this sentence:

"Then, one note unrelated to the Friends feed, I noticed a lot of concern in the comments to news and lj_releases yesterday about comments that were made in the Russian news posts. "

It goes on FOREVER !

Even for a person that has English as a native language it is long.
For an average person that hasn't got English as native lang. it is way TOO LONG !!!

In general technically skilled people are awful in writing texts.
Knowing things and being able to explain them is NOT the same thing !

This release is extremely bad written !
Who ever is boss of this "astronewt" he should spank him for doing such AWFUL job !

[leaf_kunoichi]

Actually, he writes well. The example your provided is neither overly long nor a run-on sentence.

If you are going to criticize a person's writing, you may want to improve your own.

[punch]

A+++

[intrepia]

Can you tell us whether the new friends feed will be mandatory for all users, or whether we will have an option to continue using our existing friends pages?

[slinkslowdown]

The new version will be the only one available once beta testing is over.

^From a response to a Support ticket asking the same question.

[intrepia]

Good to know, thanks. I feared/suspected as much but wanted to have it explicitly confirmed.

[larthia]

Sigh.

There goes 80% of what made it worth to have a (paid) LJ account.