a shocking suggestion

[rahaeli]

Title
a shocking suggestion

Short, concise description of the idea
Electrocute suggestions posters and commenters who do not first read the community rules and memories

Full description of the ideaWe've all rolled our eyes as Yet Another suggestion that's only a rehash of something first proposed -- and rejected -- in 1998 comes through. Imagine how bad it is

Comments

[timwi]

Not wanting to start a flamewar (which would be kind of ironic in this entry), but this entry betrays a fundamental ignorance among the LiveJournal management which has persisted at least since I joined. How long will it take for you to realise that

If something is suggested over and over again, it means that the suggested feature is needed.

Since LiveJournal are clearly unable to provide the features that everybody needs, I have no other conclusion left than to say that the management is extremely poor.

Let me give a few examples. Editing comments. Everybody wants to be able to edit comments. Everybody makes a mistake in a comment now and then and wishes they could go back and fix it without having to re-submit the same comment and delete the old one. LiveJournal's official reasons for not implementing this ("people could change the context of a later reply") are completely stupid and unfounded; furthermore, they are contradictory because entries are editable; and other websites (e.g. forums) allow editing of every comment and there is no sign of widespread abuse of that feature. (Please do not comment only to discuss this particular example as it is only an example.) Other examples include features where the excuse is "database performance", which is highly dubious with all the entries in news and lj_backend that conceitedly boast the oh-so-advanced and brilliant backend architecture that can supposedly handle any load thrown at it. Lastly, there's the extremely annoying barrier of Brad's personal arbitrary preferences, which makes features that could be useful, like style=mine, end up incomplete and virtually useless because they are only half-implemented. I won't even begin to go into the numerous cases of features that have actually been coded by unpaid volunteers and have been treated like feces.

You complain about people being too dumb to post to suggestions properly, but maybe you should think about it and maybe you will realise that it's really LiveJournal who are too dumb to cater to their users' needs properly.

[timwi]

Heh, OK, I fell for that one. Ouch.

[timwi]

some things like background music are suggested lots and we definately don't need that!

We don't? Why don't we, when a sizeable proportion of users obviously want it? Why should they be prohibited from having it, especially when it's extremely easy to add this functionality, and it's easy for you to disable it on your end? Why do you have to force such decisions on others?

[imc]

We don't? Why don't we, when a sizeable proportion of users obviously want it?

Because for every user that wants it there are five who say "hell, no!"; and for all the reasons mentioned in that recent suggestions post.

it's extremely easy to add this functionality

I think you are underestimating the issues involved. Note, incidentally, that LiveJournal does already support background music loaded from an external link on your own journal page if you are a paid user (and there are unsupported hackish ways for free users to do it too). Any more than that and you run into problems with (a) storage space, bandwidth and the RIAA if LiveJournal offers hosting (which would certainly be a paid-account-only feature) and (b) multiple soundclips competing if LiveJournal allows each journal entry to come with different background music.

it's easy for you to disable it on your end

It shouldn't be necessary, and anyway, I don't think it is easy (at least I can't immediately see an option in Mozilla to disable just background music without affecting other plugins for web sites that I might want to visit).

Why do you have to force such decisions on others?

I don't think that's any worse than forcing the developers to implement a particular suggestion.

[leora]

Or suggestions like allowing users to block a particular anonymous user from reading their entries while still allowing their friends who don't have accounts and perfectly nice strangers to be able to read them. That one pops up a lot, so it must be desireable.

But as to the actual suggestion, I think it's forgetting another possible drawback - some people may enjoy being shocked, and they might increase their bad suggestions purely to get shocked.

[subbes]

Oh, shit. I guess this means LJ really needs background music.

You win

[kingfox]

[timwi]

You mean you're still using a crappy browser that doesn't let you disable it?

[subbes]

Whatevs.

[chris_brigham]

This is off-topic, but thank you for making me (and probably many other random strangers) fall out of my chair laughing by using this icon.

[everdred]

> Everybody wants to be able to edit comments.

I don't. Please don't claim to speak for me.