LiveJournal automates privacy breach, breaks accessibility for small gains, and ...
pisses off a large number of Dreamwidth users.
LiveJournal has automated crossposting of entries and comments to Facebook and Twitter.
There are two serious problems with their implementation, one to do with accessibility/usability and one to do with privacy.Accessibility/Usability
You can ticky whether or not to crosspost with every comment you make. (This is good!) These tickyboxes appear for all users (including those who do not have a Facebook or Twitter account connected to their LiveJournal), and they appear before the submit button. (This is bad.)
Options to which someone doesn't have access are, generally speaking, something you should hide from users. Additionally, there's a large base of users with muscle memory (or, even more crucially, adaptive technology macros) who are accustomed to the old keyboard behavior for submitting a comment. Their behavior has been disrupted, and I foresee both large numbers of lost comments and large numbers of unintentionally crossposted comments in the future.
The DisConnect Greasemonkey script will remove the two ticky boxes from display on your greasemonkey-enabled browser (in quickcomment views.) Greasemonkey scripts can be used with Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. It's great if you never intend to crosspost your comments, but somewhat overkill if you would like the ability to sometimes post your comments.(A Stylish userscript has also been suggested, but I don't actually understand enough about stylish to figure out what its effect would be.) Privacy
When a comment is crossposted using this method, it includes a link to the entry which is being commented on. When commenting to Facebook, it includes the full text of the comment. (Twitter receives only the comment title or a snippet.) This method is enabled (although not by default on, i.e. the tickyboxes won't be checked until the commenter does something to check them) for comments made to other people's or community's locked entries. Many people are concerned that (a) the fact that a locked entry was made is revealed and (b) the potentially compromising text of the comment is posted. Although it has always been able to manually do this, there are instances when a sufficient difference in quantity (the ease of the ability to do this has risen exponentially) creates a different quality of experience. This is compounded by the fact that the poor UI choice makes it quite likely that keyboard users will do this accidentally. I think it's a real privacy concern.
There is not currently a way to disable this ticky option from appearing on comment reply forms to your entries on LiveJournal. (Maybe someone will write an s2 module that does away with it? This won't help on ?style=mine, but it might help some.)
If you are currently crossposting from Dreamwidth and would like to close comments on your crossposted entries, on the Manage Other Sites page, in the Crosspost Settings, (below Add New Account), the first option is a ticky for Comments Disable comments on crossposts made to other sites. You want the ticky to be checked if you want to close comments on LiveJournal. (If you would like to start a Dreamwidth journal, pick up an invite code from
dw_codesharing or buy a new account. [Minimum purchase US$3 for a one month paid account.])
If you would like to disable comments on old entries to LiveJournal, the best solution I have found is to change your journal privacy settings so that comments are only allowed from friends, all comments are screened, and a captcha is displayed to all commenters. This does not absolutely prevent someone from commenting on an entry, but it does mean someone has to be determined in order to do so, and it leaves all of the old comments visible.
azurelunatic has the most interesting not negative commentary I've seen on the issue, but a lot of other people have typed up their displeasure. zulu makes the most complete negative commentary I've seen. The Latest Things dreamwidth tag is currently illustrative of the rage, and you can also check both DW site search and LJ site search for terms like "livejournal fail" or "facebook twitter" to see people's unhappy reactions.
(Additionally, the broken tags which include / is a bug which LJ is working to correct. If I were you, I would not change my tags, so that the fix can be applied to them automatically, once it rolls out.)
Furthermore, pingbacks have returned, but the privacy there is a lot better implemented. ETA: Spoke too soon. Pingback notifications are sent from locked entries and include snippets of the locked posts. That is to say, if I have pingbacks set to open, and I make a locked post linking to an entry by myworstenemy, and myworstenemy has pingbacks enbabled, myworstenemy will get a notice that I linked to them, with a snippet of the text surrounding the link. If I remember correctly, this didn't happen in the original implementation of pingbacks, and who the fuck thought this was a good idea, I'm sure I don't know. I sort of get what they're thinking with reposting my comments to a locked entry. I think they're wrong, but I get it. The pingbacks are just…creepy and invasive and bad. /ETA
Son of ETA: Security geek extraordinaire
helens78 has extensively tested pingback security. It does not appear that a link made from an entry that was ORIGINALLY locked will trigger a pingback. However, if an entry began life as locked, then is switched to public and edited, it will trigger a pingback. If an entry began life as public, and then is immediately changed to locked after posting, it will still trigger a pingback. At least some of the earlier reports of pingbacks from locked entries appear to involve older public entries which were locked subsequent to pingbacks being re-established. According to helens78's testing, this behavior (public post being locked triggering a pingback) is no longer occurring.
eta 3 - The Edits fight Back
You should still double-check your privacy settings; pingback is defaulted to "open" if you had not set a preference during previous iterations of the feature.
Original post at Dreamwidth. Read (
) comments or reply there using Open ID.
LiveJournal has automated crossposting of entries and comments to Facebook and Twitter.
There are two serious problems with their implementation, one to do with accessibility/usability and one to do with privacy.Accessibility/Usability
You can ticky whether or not to crosspost with every comment you make. (This is good!) These tickyboxes appear for all users (including those who do not have a Facebook or Twitter account connected to their LiveJournal), and they appear before the submit button. (This is bad.)
Options to which someone doesn't have access are, generally speaking, something you should hide from users. Additionally, there's a large base of users with muscle memory (or, even more crucially, adaptive technology macros) who are accustomed to the old keyboard behavior for submitting a comment. Their behavior has been disrupted, and I foresee both large numbers of lost comments and large numbers of unintentionally crossposted comments in the future.
The DisConnect Greasemonkey script will remove the two ticky boxes from display on your greasemonkey-enabled browser (in quickcomment views.) Greasemonkey scripts can be used with Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. It's great if you never intend to crosspost your comments, but somewhat overkill if you would like the ability to sometimes post your comments.(A Stylish userscript has also been suggested, but I don't actually understand enough about stylish to figure out what its effect would be.) Privacy
When a comment is crossposted using this method, it includes a link to the entry which is being commented on. When commenting to Facebook, it includes the full text of the comment. (Twitter receives only the comment title or a snippet.) This method is enabled (although not by default on, i.e. the tickyboxes won't be checked until the commenter does something to check them) for comments made to other people's or community's locked entries. Many people are concerned that (a) the fact that a locked entry was made is revealed and (b) the potentially compromising text of the comment is posted. Although it has always been able to manually do this, there are instances when a sufficient difference in quantity (the ease of the ability to do this has risen exponentially) creates a different quality of experience. This is compounded by the fact that the poor UI choice makes it quite likely that keyboard users will do this accidentally. I think it's a real privacy concern.
There is not currently a way to disable this ticky option from appearing on comment reply forms to your entries on LiveJournal. (Maybe someone will write an s2 module that does away with it? This won't help on ?style=mine, but it might help some.)
If you are currently crossposting from Dreamwidth and would like to close comments on your crossposted entries, on the Manage Other Sites page, in the Crosspost Settings, (below Add New Account), the first option is a ticky for Comments Disable comments on crossposts made to other sites. You want the ticky to be checked if you want to close comments on LiveJournal. (If you would like to start a Dreamwidth journal, pick up an invite code from
dw_codesharing or buy a new account. [Minimum purchase US$3 for a one month paid account.])
If you would like to disable comments on old entries to LiveJournal, the best solution I have found is to change your journal privacy settings so that comments are only allowed from friends, all comments are screened, and a captcha is displayed to all commenters. This does not absolutely prevent someone from commenting on an entry, but it does mean someone has to be determined in order to do so, and it leaves all of the old comments visible.
azurelunatic has the most interesting not negative commentary I've seen on the issue, but a lot of other people have typed up their displeasure. zulu makes the most complete negative commentary I've seen. The Latest Things dreamwidth tag is currently illustrative of the rage, and you can also check both DW site search and LJ site search for terms like "livejournal fail" or "facebook twitter" to see people's unhappy reactions.
(Additionally, the broken tags which include / is a bug which LJ is working to correct. If I were you, I would not change my tags, so that the fix can be applied to them automatically, once it rolls out.)
Furthermore, pingbacks have returned, but the privacy there is a lot better implemented. ETA: Spoke too soon. Pingback notifications are sent from locked entries and include snippets of the locked posts. That is to say, if I have pingbacks set to open, and I make a locked post linking to an entry by myworstenemy, and myworstenemy has pingbacks enbabled, myworstenemy will get a notice that I linked to them, with a snippet of the text surrounding the link. If I remember correctly, this didn't happen in the original implementation of pingbacks, and who the fuck thought this was a good idea, I'm sure I don't know. I sort of get what they're thinking with reposting my comments to a locked entry. I think they're wrong, but I get it. The pingbacks are just…creepy and invasive and bad. /ETA
Son of ETA: Security geek extraordinaire
helens78 has extensively tested pingback security. It does not appear that a link made from an entry that was ORIGINALLY locked will trigger a pingback. However, if an entry began life as locked, then is switched to public and edited, it will trigger a pingback. If an entry began life as public, and then is immediately changed to locked after posting, it will still trigger a pingback. At least some of the earlier reports of pingbacks from locked entries appear to involve older public entries which were locked subsequent to pingbacks being re-established. According to helens78's testing, this behavior (public post being locked triggering a pingback) is no longer occurring.
eta 3 - The Edits fight Back
- Security geek extraordinaire
helens78 confirms accounts with pingbacks turned off send pingbacks.
cleolinda has screencaps of a twitter crosspost and a facebook crosspost. She also reports that, if you enable facebook, your full facebook name appears on your livejournal profile.
inlovewithnight ruminates on the fact that fandom* is expanding to other platforms, including facebook and twitter. (*I believe they are referring to mediabased fandom, but I am not 100% positive.)
sohotrightnow (who has a different LJ name I don't remember right now) points out that LJ could have done a good thing with this integration. Connecting your LJ and Facebook/Twitter is not inherently the work of the devil, and people who don't want their public posts linked to on non-journaling platforms have already lost that battle. Because they've posted something to the internet. The problem, the breakdown, the thing that LJ is not grasping is that, as
jazzfish says, [t]he ability to lock your posts to a subset of your readers creates an expectation, and culture, of privacy.
rivkat introduces the word I've been trying to grope toward when explaining how this is a security concern: the new function changes the affordances of reposting content originally posted in a locked setting.- You may have noticed that the icon I'm using is my LJ icon, and that I have not tagged this entry dreamwidth.
niquaeli explains that Dreamwidth is not LiveJournal, Only Better. If you want proof of that, look at the prototype new update page. This is the third public iteration of the page. (There will be at least one more, because we still haven't seen it anything except the default style.) This week's
dw_news comments are sort of atypical, so I'm going to link you to the previous request for comments in a news post, so you can see more about how a big change like that is handled on Dreamwidth. (If you want to see how smaller changes get talked through, read through
dw_suggestions.)
You should still double-check your privacy settings; pingback is defaulted to "open" if you had not set a preference during previous iterations of the feature.
Original post at Dreamwidth. Read (
) comments or reply there using Open ID.