Title
Rollback on 88?
Short, concise description of the idea
Release 88 makes LJ very difficult to use; I support a rollback.
Full description of the idea
The recently-implemented Release 88, dealing mostly with comments, makes LiveJournal incredibly difficult to use for me; I can't read the default comment pages (lack of subject title, new treatment of comment threads, too-bright colours), nor can I comment (awkward, bandwidth-hogging handling of userpics, lack of preview options, no subject title). Many communities I follow are switching over to custom comments pages that are as hard to read as the default was. In addition, the modifications to how comments are handled (animated spinner, linking change, weird collapse/expand behaviour, new comments sans reload) make reading and commenting in threads difficult and tend to make one's own comments disappear temporarily on refresh. If there is some way to make the Release 88 user interface (seeing as there's been mockups of a sitewide redesign along the same lines, in the case of which I am pretty sure I'd have to leave outright and similarly for at least half my social group) *optional* and reinstate as default the same one that's worked for, as far as I know, at least a decade, I think pretty much all of LJ's users would rejoice.
(Context, on my part: I'm abandoning this account soon and had been planning to start over with a writing/personal account pair, with one or both paid. Now I'm leaning towards leaving altogether! What fun.)
An ordered list of benefits
- Appeases the over nine thousand users objecting to 88
- Keeps comment-oriented journals and communities from moving
- Makes userbase migration less likely
- Easier on people who need things like comment keywords for accessibility
- Easier-to-read interface
- Icon selection does not take ten minutes or more to load and differentiates between active and inactive icons
- Extensive userscripting no longer a basic prerequisite for day-to-day tasks
An ordered list of problems/issues involved
- People who actually liked Release 88 may be upset
- Possible downtime in implementation
- You do not lose your entire userbase to other sites or sheer disinterest, which seems to be the goal here, judging by how LJ's been