Two damn things...

[eregyrn]

Grrr, okay. I can ask about this here, on the off chance that anybody who has friended me has run into these problems and found out the solutions already. Or, I can write to LJ's customer service, if such a beast exists, because the online FAQs are not helping me.

Problem Number One - Hinky Friends List BehaviorI discovered this today. I have

Comments

[okojosan]

I've had the weird friends list thing happen to me too. Sometimes I think it's because the person is in a different time zone, someimes I think it's because they posted the message private first, then made it friends only/public. The third option is that the entry in question is actually backdated, even if it's a current entry. Backdated entries won't show up on your friends list, even if the date is current. You can still seem them on the entries page of your friend's journal, though.

If none of those are going on, then I'm as baffled as you are. :D

As for the second problem, I have nooo idea. I view other people's comments as my own format because a lot of the times I find they've chosen colors I don't like or simply can't read the text on. :/

[eregyrn]

*BING*! You win the prize for getting the answer to #1. :) Judith had backdated the entries after first making them (because her laptop's date setting was wrong, she noticed later -- it thought it was August 20). I found this out when Judith called, after I posted.

#2 still a mystery, though.

[suzvoy]

Afraid all I can suggest is contacting LJ, if possible. Sorry!

[erskine]

"Computer HARD! Beer foamy..."

[maxineofarc]

People's posts disappear from my friends page. I'll see them, and then the next time I go to check, they'll be gone, and I'll have a massive attack of paranoia because so-and-so doesn't like me anymore, but there I am, still on the friends list. It happens with Bill and Tina a lot.

[shoka]

#2 is typically caused by bad html in the person's LJ entry. The #1 cause of bad html is quizzes and meme things where someone either copy/pastes bad html from the quiz site, or they miscopy the html. Most (all?) of the LJ style pages rely on html tables. Depending on what sort of bad html it is, the comments end up being a narrow columnar because the bad html has an erroneous close of a row or extra elements causing the comments to be squiched.

(FWIW, since I am driveby commenting, this is okojosan's friend Andrea, who was briefly in Logres)

[eregyrn]

Hi, Andrea! *waves*

Okay, I...mostly...understood that. I'm not very html-savvy.

The thing is...when I have experienced this in others' LJs, the actual original message has never contained one of those meme/quiz tables. I don't know if there has been one of them pasted in, in some previous post in the LJ. So -- would the user having pasted one in once have caused the comments in *all subsequent posts* to be screwed up like this?

And further -- I have, in a few cases, talked to the people with the LJs where I notice these things. I've posted comments in the threads that say, "I'm seeing all these comments looking like this". And the LJ owner, and other users commenting, have always said, "Huh, it looks fine to us".

If pasted-in bad html were causing the problem, shouldn't everbody see it?

[shoka]

Eep, sorry about the detailed html-speak. I often forget that most people don't look at raw html *blush*.

Hmm, the 'all subsequent posts', definitely doesn't sound like a quiz/meme thing. If it's bad html, it's something in the LJ style or something about the content of the entry being posted.

When it looks fine for other folks and not you, it happens. It could be that the page is cached for you and the person who posted the fubared entries has fixed it, though this is less likely if you say subsequent pages are also fubared. Could be that your browser behaves differently than browsers used by the other folks. Unfortunately, different browsers (IE, Mozilla, Netscape, Opera, etc) often handle html in subtly different ways, sometimes resulting in gross visual differences when the page is displayed. Worse yet, different versions of the same browsers will also sometimes behave differently.

If you have one of the fubared pages which you can share, I'd happily take a look at it. I'm curious now to see if I figure out what's wrong.

[eregyrn]

In my entry, click on the link to brighidestone's LJ; that is the most recent one in which I have noticed this happening.

Her most recent entry doesn't necessarily count, because it *does* have a pasted-in quiz/meme table. :)

But I looked at some of her entries before that, which don't, and I still see this happening with all replies to her posts.

(It used to happen in tempe's LJ too, but as I said, she changed the layout and now I don't notice it happening any more with her.)