OMG WHAT IS THIS FUCKERY.
Okay, so remember
my crazed rant about LJ’s newest fail?
IT GOT WORSE.
I’m sure most/all of you have heard already, but just so you know: Livejournal has
TURNED ON automatic payments on some paid accounts. If you - like me - have a paid account with automatic payments switched off, you’d better check
here.. I still have the email from months ago when I turned off automatic payments. If I hadn’t seen these links, LJ would have got more of my money when I specifically hit buttons to NOT give it to them.
It’s unclear whether it’s a glitch - from what I can tell it hasn’t happened to every paid account - but the timing is, to say the least, suspicious. And as far as I’m concerned it’s on the very edge of corporate fraud.
Less immoral but still more annoying is the disabling of customised comment pages, wrecking lots of layouts and forcing us to use the horrible new comment pages with all their functional and aesthetic problems.
The other charming news is
the new message LJ sent out this morning. It was not, one might say, a full response to the thousands of complaints.
The complaints about subject lines? The fact that the parent/thread buttons are gone, and so is ‘flatview’, massively damaging the ability to navigate threads? Many of the more significant problems with Release 88?
NOT EVEN MENTIONED.
Fuck this shit.
Old subject line warnings - for spoilers, but more worryingly for triggers - have vanished. LJ is, from what I can tell, not even contemplating bringing them back, even though users have already
been triggered as a result of the loss of comment subject lines.
Other users have been complaining of migraines caused by the new look. Accessibility has been pretty comprehensively fucked with: people with visual impairments seem to be finding it especially difficult. But LJ apparently doesn’t give a shit.
After all, the head of LJ Russia - its biggest market - has been loudly dismissive, ignorant of the userbase, and
openly fucking rude. And nothing has happened.
Grrrrrr.
Dreamwidth announced there were no invite codes needed for December before all this began - they’re not taking advantage - but the
stats say 21 903 accounts were created on Tuesday, and 34 257 yesterday. Go Dreamwidth. Which reminds me: there’s a post from
dragonfly here about getting started on DW.
I’ll remind you all myself: subscribing makes my entries show up on your DW flist; granting access gives me access to your flocked entries. The two functions of friending have very sensibly been separated over on DW, and I am getting LJ people giving me access without subscribing. And maybe you all just want my advice on personal situations but don’t want my fic... but it seems unlikely :)
Dreamwidth are
looking into ways to import LJ communities, with all their entries and comments, as opposed to just personal accounts. Obviously this will have privacy/control implications - but you’ll be able to use your LJ account to delete/edit your posts and entries at imported-to-DW comms, and I expect negotiations over comms between mods and users will be ongoing. But for RPGs, especially, this is good news!
Anyway, beyond all that: check out
rollback88. It’s a comm where you can fill out a poll about your opinions on Release 88 and which things specifically are or aren’t causing you difficulties. Providing hard data about all the users who want which things fixed, and you don’t have to fight CAPTCHA to do it! Hurray!