For Paid/Plus Users Who Want Something Close to the Old Layout

[shadowravyn]

It's not perfect, not by a longshot. But it's something that is not eye-searingly painful:

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 many of us do it almost impossible. (It also screws up and anonmemes/kinkmemes, among other fannish pursuits.)

Problems

• The ability to add subject lines in comments is gone (on purpose)



• The ability to see already-existing subject lines is gone (on purpose). They've been included as bold text down in the body of the comment so the data isn't lost, but don't appear when comments are collapsed.



• The "Parent" link is gone.



• The "Thread" link is also gone, but at least you can still get that URL by right-clicking the "Expand" link and copying or opening it in another tab.



• The text drop-down list for choosing an icon is gone, replacing it with a forced visual browse of all your icons



• Currently that includes inactive icons (your paid account or extra icon packages lapsed), without telling you they're inactive - if you choose one, it will post with your default icon instead. (This one is probably a bug that will get fixed.)



• If you choose an icon that has more than one keyword -- like the icon I'm posting with, which is both "eating (this is...not good)" and "w/Kenzi (food)" -- the comment will post with your default icon instead. (This one is also probably a bug that will get fixed.)



• The browse box is in the order you uploaded the icons, because that's useful, and the search box for it is case-sensitive, so if you type in the name, good luck remembering whether you capitalized or not



• Various parts and functions of the page won't load or work at all for various people, in various browsers, or on phones

This comment style is currently unavoidable if you have a free account or you're not logged in.

Workarounds for Now

If you have a paid or plus account, you can go here and change the "Disable customized comment pages for your journal" setting to No, to see your own pages in whatever style you're currently using for your journal. Most of these have subject lines, parent links, and the text-drop-list for icons. E-mail notifications sent from comments that have subject lines are (now) working, and thread properly in GMail as usual.

Once you've done that, you can go to Settings and check "View all journals and communities in my own style." This will show all comment pages anywhere in your chosen style.

However, many of these styles are buggy, not well-suited for reading lots of text, and designed with fixed widths that squish long comment threads down to the

point
where
they
read like
this...

So stoppedhiding worked up a custom comments style that tries as hard as possible to mimic the old LJ style that we're used to; articletwelve added tweaks that get it even closer, here.

The drawback is that if you choose this, it'll take away your pretty custom layouts for your journal and friendslist. The benefit is that it looks a lot like the old comments page, and almost everything works. The only thing it doesn't quite fix is that screened comments aren't grayed-out (if it's your journal and you can see the screened comments). You have to look at the eye icon, and if it doesn't have the slash across it, it's screened.

We've applied this style to all of our game's communities; you can go here to see it in action. (Unless you already have
"View all journals and communities in my own style" set, of course.)

To make this work:

• Again, you have to have a plus or paid account



• Go here and choose "Minimalism" on the left



• Choose the "Georgia" theme and Apply Theme



• Scroll down to "Choose a Page Setup" and choose "2 column, sidebar on left" (there is no sidebar, but you have to choose this layout to make the design work)



• Then "Customize Selected Theme"



• Choose "Custom CSS" on the left



• In the Custom Stylesheet box, paste:
  
  body {
  font-size:10px;
  }
  
  .sidebar { display:none; }
  
  small {font-size:11px !important;}
  
  big {font-size:110%;}
  
  .content-inner {
  margin-left:20px !important;
  overflow:visible;
  }
  
  .content .entry {
  width:80%
  overflow:visible;
  font-family:Verdana, Georgia, serif;
  }
  
  .username {max-width:120px;}
  
  h3 { margin-top:0px !important; }
  
  .entrymenu a {padding-top:20px !important; }



• Click "Save Changes"

It's not the prettiest layout to read your friendslist in, but the majority of where we interact is in the comments, so you take the good, you take the bad, you take 'em both and write Jo/Blair femslash.

There's also a layout that includes a sidebar for links/tags/etc. but is otherwise the same. If you'd rather use that, all the instructions are the same, but you paste this in the Custom Stylesheet box:

body {
font-size:10px;
}

.sidebar, .sidebar-inner { width:275px !important; }

.sidebar-tags { width:240px !important; }

small {font-size:11px !important;}

big {font-size:110%;}

.content-inner {
margin-left:290px !important;
overflow:visible;
}

.content .entry {
width:80%
overflow:visible;
font-family:Verdana, Georgia, serif;
}

.username {max-width:120px;}

h3 { margin-top:0px !important; }

.entrymenu a {padding-top:20px !important; }

Some additional workaround options are being collected here in advancing's journal, so check those out if you're interested, as well.

It's probably also important to know that they've stated in the main post "We are also planning to create a new S2 commenting style which will appear & function in the same way as the old site scheme commenting page to be included in the near future." We don't know when that near future will be, how close that new S2 style will be to the old one, or whether it will let us keep our personalized journal styles while choosing the custom comment style. (Which we can't do with the workaround styles discussed above.)

This post supplied by the amazing and wonderful mpoetess. Please feel free to distribute this as far and wide as you'd like.