Why to move? Why not?
Hi duckies! As you know, your friendly moderators have been considering whether or not to move the game to Dreamwidth in response to the latest developments in LJ-land. We have polled the community and read your concerns and comments, and we have also done a lot of discussion behind the scenes and a large amount of research and planning, to determine not only whether a move is generally wanted by the community, but whether it is in the community's best interests. I would like to bring it all together, so that you as the player base can see some of what we've learned, and the issues that we have been grappling with.
So now I'm going to break down the reasons, for and against a move, for our community, as we see it at this stage. I really encourage questions and discussion in this post, and then, go fill out the poll at the bottom of the post. No matter what, the final decision is not made until we say it has been made, and the feelings of our players are of paramount importance to us.
Reasons Why We Would Move
Livejournal's new site scheme is inaccessible to many players
The colour scheme of the new system, and the larger amount of white space, are causing migraines in a significant minority of users, and eye strain in a large percentage of users. How bad it is depends on how much you use it and how susceptible you are to such things. In addition, there are practical issues of accessibility, as the new comment system seems to be incompatible with the mobile devices of many users.
This is not just a general, site-wide problem, but a problem experienced and identified to us by several individual players. (More players, I should point out, than have marked the 'No and I will drop' option on our first poll).
LJ has stated outright that they will not be rolling back the changes, and it's going to get worse. Serious warning to those who are having headaches already, you may not want to click that link.
In contrast, Dreamwidth has a specific community as part of its development process to address accessibility issues and ensure that releases are accessible. Any user can join and comment there. It is here. The main site colour scheme is specifically designed with eye strain issues in mind, which is why it's a bit grey instead of white.
LJ's new site scheme removes functionality that we as roleplayers use
Preview, spell-check, and subject lines have been removed, all functions that we have all made significant use of. Without the parent and thread options, and instead only being able to expand links, long threads are a lot more difficult to navigate. I have to scroll to the right to read long threads.
The new icon picker duplicates the old Browse function while removing the drop-down menu option. The icons are not in alphabetical order, which messes up a lot of people's organization system and makes it harder to quickly pick icons without adding any useful or beneficial functionality. As a lot of RPers have over 100 icons per journal, icons are important.
Though this is likely an unintended glitch, all comments from deleted journals are now hidden (though probably not permanently deleted as many people fear) which has broken a lot of old threads. Dreamwidth staff believe that the comments will show up on a community import, so they are not gone, but hidden on LJ. No word has come from LJ about why this has happened or if they're going to fix it.
It's true that there are workarounds for the new comment form using the S2 layout scheme and that LJ has stated that a skin will be installed in S2 (though who knows when) that will mimic the old site. However, the problem with this solution is that it is in S2. That means that S2's problems with threading will continue to be present. Long threads in S2 break and run off the page, and every time you reply it kicks you out to the main page. These issues have been ongoing for years with no change or improvement, and we have no reason to believe they'll be fixed. That's the reason we have all been using the workaround of not using custom comment pages all this time, but now we will have to to avoid headache-inducing layouts.
Dreamwidth has additional functionality that will benefit us as roleplayers and moderators
Dreamwidth isn't just an LJ clone. They have made a lot of improvements to the site that are specifically targeted at fandom and roleplaying, or which had other reasons for implementation and merely benefit us. A short list:
Livejournal does not value us as paid users
As of right now, ad revenue and the Singapore blogshopping market are Livejournal's major financial contributors, and paid journals make up only a small part of their revenue. As such, they are not afraid for us to take our business elsewhere. Here is an article about the Singapore market.
This attitude is reflected by the paid (not volunteer) staff who are often dismissive or just plain rude to users when issues are brought up.
igrick (whom most of you have probably heard of by now) is head of LJ Russia, and basically told us not to let the door hit our asses on the way out. There is more discussion here under Administration. I advise you read that entire entry, actually. If you'd like more information, there is a lot of additional research and it's all good stuff, most of which I'm not including here. I don't want this post to be any longer than it already is!
In contrast, Dreamwidth does not have any advertising on their website and is fully funded by paid users, running with a surplus of funds just on that basis. I have had or witnessed tonnes of dealings directly with staff and they have been universally friendly, welcoming, and thoughtful. They take user concerns into account and take the time to explain things. User suggestions are regularly implemented as features.
Livejournal does not value our right to do what we do
Dreamwidth specifically welcomes fandom and RP and their business philosophy reflects a desire to be a welcoming home for fandom. Check out this Diversity Statement for an example. I think it's non-controversial to say that LJ doesn't seem to have any particular desire to have fandom be a part of their service.
In fact, not only does Dreamwidth welcome fandom, but they put their money where their mouth is, which is almost unheard of. Dreamwidth has taken stands against corporations on behalf of their users in the past. The reason they don't have a Paypal option for paying for accounts is because Paypal demanded that they change their TOS to censor users engaging in legal expressive activity.
In the past, LJ has unilaterally banned users engaging in the same kind of free expression. I think most of us remember Strikethrough, and the interest-based banning incident. This sort of thing is of importance to our game, because many themes that are explored within roleplaying are on the edge of respectability.
Essentially we have survived on LJ by flying under the radar, and trying to work within censorship rules that are not clearly defined. Many of you may remember that we began being more strict about LJ cuts and locking adult-themed entries after Strikethrough. At Dreamwidth, this would not be necessary, though cuts will obviously still be good, to prevent people from being triggered, we won't have to worry about censorship.
Livejournal is not a reliable service
Sad as it is to say, DDoS attacks have affected our ability to play, and LJ has grown more and more unreliable over time. LJ clearly does not sufficiently test their releases before releasing them, causing outages and breaking functionality unintentionally quite often when an upgrade happens. We are having to implement workarounds to our workarounds (Like for example, this problem experienced by Lylith regularly, which I was experiencing even before the release) just to use the site properly.
And this is nothing new.
Livejournal is not trustworthy
Twice now that I'm aware of, LJ users have mysteriously had automatic payments turned on without their consent. LJ staff called users "slanderers and liars" when they claimed it had happened to them.
LJ Staff have stalked users and gone unpunished. One source for this, and more on R's post linked above.
Reasons That Are Neither For or Against Moving
We will lose some players
Unfortunately, this is true whether we move or not.
Other games are moving, or considering moving
We don't yet know how many games will ultimately move. The more games that do, the more games probably will. If a game as large as ours moves, this will likely encourage other games that may be on the fence to follow suit, and hopefully mitigate some of the problems of the Dreamwidth community being smaller than the Livejournal community, because we'll all be there!
As of today, several large games have indeed made the decision to move, including campfuckudie, luceti, and singularity_rpg. However, many other games are still on the fence. We don't how that will play out right now, and can only decide what's best for our own game and hope that this works out in our favour one way or another.
Dreamwidth has all of the functionality that we have always used
LJ Login and LJ Juggler do work for Dreamwidth, too. If you're not sure how to enable it on LJ Login, just ask me and I can walk you through it, and if you use Chrome, Suki is the go-to girl!
Pretty much all of the LJ related tags that we're used to (lj-cut, lj user) still work, though there are also neutral versions (cut, user name).
Dreamwidth paid accounts are approximately equivalent to LJ paid accounts in price. Though there is currently no a la carte icons (though they are considering instituting this), a paid account on Dreamwidth has 100 icons and a premium account has 250 icons. The prices work out to approximately the same for the same number of icons, or slightly cheaper on Dreamwidth.
Livejournal - paid + 70 iconsDreamwidth - paid includes 100 icons
One Month ---$3
Two Months$7$6
Six Months$21$17.50
One Year$35$35
Also, all the functionality that LJ removed in Release 88 is still there on Dreamwidth of course.
Why We Would Not Move
Moving will be a big job and may be too disruptive to the game as a whole
This is very true, but it may not be as disruptive as you may think. Dreamwidth has now rolled out community import, and it will be available to communities the size of DramaDramaDuck very soon. The import process automatically imports pretty much all aspects of a journal - posts, comments, tags, profile, icons, EVERYTHING. The Dreamwidth staff have told us they expect DDD to take 2-3 days to import. Importing is extremely easy and just involves entering a password and checking some ticky boxes. I know how much you all love ticky boxes.
So how would moving probably take place? If it were to happen, here is a handy step-by-step guide to how I would envision it working.
The whole process should be fairly seamless, with no need for people to 'start over', so while it is a big job for the moderators, the players shouldn't have much of an interruption in playing. We've had worse disruptions during DDoS attacks.
Dreamwidth has some functions that aren't as good/Dreamwidth is different from LJ
There are some ways in which Dreamwidth isn't as good as Livejournal:
We will lose paid time we spent already
Yes. I have done a lot of investigating of Open ID and looking at options, and there's no getting around that, unfortunately.
However, if we move, there's no reason why you can't continue to back tag on LJ until the paid time runs out, if all players involved in the thread agree, since we'll likely do an import down the line to capture any missed comments. Obviously new posts would have to go on the community to keep things organized, so players don't have to look in two places.
And quite frankly, at least this would be the last time you have to worry about losing paid time. Dreamwidth is instituting the ability to cash in unused paid time for points, which you can use to buy paid time for other accounts. I seriously screamed when I read about this. How many times have I dropped a character with paid time still left on his account and it was wasted? So many times, ydek.
Other Concerns Not Already Mentioned
Can Dreamwidth handle the additional traffic?
Signs point to yes.
And for your voting pleasure:
Poll
For this poll, only the mod account can see who voted for what option, although everyone can see the votes per option. ALSO I can't edit the poll but the bottom option should read "No, and I will drop if we move."
So now I'm going to break down the reasons, for and against a move, for our community, as we see it at this stage. I really encourage questions and discussion in this post, and then, go fill out the poll at the bottom of the post. No matter what, the final decision is not made until we say it has been made, and the feelings of our players are of paramount importance to us.
Reasons Why We Would Move
Livejournal's new site scheme is inaccessible to many players
The colour scheme of the new system, and the larger amount of white space, are causing migraines in a significant minority of users, and eye strain in a large percentage of users. How bad it is depends on how much you use it and how susceptible you are to such things. In addition, there are practical issues of accessibility, as the new comment system seems to be incompatible with the mobile devices of many users.
This is not just a general, site-wide problem, but a problem experienced and identified to us by several individual players. (More players, I should point out, than have marked the 'No and I will drop' option on our first poll).
LJ has stated outright that they will not be rolling back the changes, and it's going to get worse. Serious warning to those who are having headaches already, you may not want to click that link.
In contrast, Dreamwidth has a specific community as part of its development process to address accessibility issues and ensure that releases are accessible. Any user can join and comment there. It is here. The main site colour scheme is specifically designed with eye strain issues in mind, which is why it's a bit grey instead of white.
LJ's new site scheme removes functionality that we as roleplayers use
Preview, spell-check, and subject lines have been removed, all functions that we have all made significant use of. Without the parent and thread options, and instead only being able to expand links, long threads are a lot more difficult to navigate. I have to scroll to the right to read long threads.
The new icon picker duplicates the old Browse function while removing the drop-down menu option. The icons are not in alphabetical order, which messes up a lot of people's organization system and makes it harder to quickly pick icons without adding any useful or beneficial functionality. As a lot of RPers have over 100 icons per journal, icons are important.
Though this is likely an unintended glitch, all comments from deleted journals are now hidden (though probably not permanently deleted as many people fear) which has broken a lot of old threads. Dreamwidth staff believe that the comments will show up on a community import, so they are not gone, but hidden on LJ. No word has come from LJ about why this has happened or if they're going to fix it.
It's true that there are workarounds for the new comment form using the S2 layout scheme and that LJ has stated that a skin will be installed in S2 (though who knows when) that will mimic the old site. However, the problem with this solution is that it is in S2. That means that S2's problems with threading will continue to be present. Long threads in S2 break and run off the page, and every time you reply it kicks you out to the main page. These issues have been ongoing for years with no change or improvement, and we have no reason to believe they'll be fixed. That's the reason we have all been using the workaround of not using custom comment pages all this time, but now we will have to to avoid headache-inducing layouts.
Dreamwidth has additional functionality that will benefit us as roleplayers and moderators
Dreamwidth isn't just an LJ clone. They have made a lot of improvements to the site that are specifically targeted at fandom and roleplaying, or which had other reasons for implementation and merely benefit us. A short list:
- The tagging system is better, allowing tiered tags and with a more advanced tag management system
- Longer usernames - 25 characters instead of 15
- Longer comments (16,000 characters) and posts (300,000 characters O_O) making modding easier (no more broken up Taken Characters List) and playing easier for the tl;dr-lovers among us
- Ability to have fully-screened conversations - excellent for moderator purposes such as on the suggestion/complaints post.
- Sticky posts without forward dating (though just one. Forward dating still works, too)
- Expandable LJ cuts - A neat feature when just scanning your flist and deciding which posts to tag into. You can just hit a little triangle to see what's behind the cut without having to go into the post itself
- You can include the reason for editing a comment
- When you change icon keywords, it doesn't break old ones, so the icons stay the same instead of reverting to the default (Suki nearly cried when she saw this)
- Because of the way notifications are formatted on Dreamwidth, people who use gmail labels to sort their tags can also sort by game
- There is NO LIMIT to the number of friend adds you can do at once on the admin console, so you could redo your flist in one go, making it much easier to keep up with journals.
Livejournal does not value us as paid users
As of right now, ad revenue and the Singapore blogshopping market are Livejournal's major financial contributors, and paid journals make up only a small part of their revenue. As such, they are not afraid for us to take our business elsewhere. Here is an article about the Singapore market.
This attitude is reflected by the paid (not volunteer) staff who are often dismissive or just plain rude to users when issues are brought up.
igrick (whom most of you have probably heard of by now) is head of LJ Russia, and basically told us not to let the door hit our asses on the way out. There is more discussion here under Administration. I advise you read that entire entry, actually. If you'd like more information, there is a lot of additional research and it's all good stuff, most of which I'm not including here. I don't want this post to be any longer than it already is!
In contrast, Dreamwidth does not have any advertising on their website and is fully funded by paid users, running with a surplus of funds just on that basis. I have had or witnessed tonnes of dealings directly with staff and they have been universally friendly, welcoming, and thoughtful. They take user concerns into account and take the time to explain things. User suggestions are regularly implemented as features.
Livejournal does not value our right to do what we do
Dreamwidth specifically welcomes fandom and RP and their business philosophy reflects a desire to be a welcoming home for fandom. Check out this Diversity Statement for an example. I think it's non-controversial to say that LJ doesn't seem to have any particular desire to have fandom be a part of their service.
In fact, not only does Dreamwidth welcome fandom, but they put their money where their mouth is, which is almost unheard of. Dreamwidth has taken stands against corporations on behalf of their users in the past. The reason they don't have a Paypal option for paying for accounts is because Paypal demanded that they change their TOS to censor users engaging in legal expressive activity.
In the past, LJ has unilaterally banned users engaging in the same kind of free expression. I think most of us remember Strikethrough, and the interest-based banning incident. This sort of thing is of importance to our game, because many themes that are explored within roleplaying are on the edge of respectability.
Essentially we have survived on LJ by flying under the radar, and trying to work within censorship rules that are not clearly defined. Many of you may remember that we began being more strict about LJ cuts and locking adult-themed entries after Strikethrough. At Dreamwidth, this would not be necessary, though cuts will obviously still be good, to prevent people from being triggered, we won't have to worry about censorship.
Livejournal is not a reliable service
Sad as it is to say, DDoS attacks have affected our ability to play, and LJ has grown more and more unreliable over time. LJ clearly does not sufficiently test their releases before releasing them, causing outages and breaking functionality unintentionally quite often when an upgrade happens. We are having to implement workarounds to our workarounds (Like for example, this problem experienced by Lylith regularly, which I was experiencing even before the release) just to use the site properly.
And this is nothing new.
Livejournal is not trustworthy
Twice now that I'm aware of, LJ users have mysteriously had automatic payments turned on without their consent. LJ staff called users "slanderers and liars" when they claimed it had happened to them.
LJ Staff have stalked users and gone unpunished. One source for this, and more on R's post linked above.
Reasons That Are Neither For or Against Moving
We will lose some players
Unfortunately, this is true whether we move or not.
Other games are moving, or considering moving
We don't yet know how many games will ultimately move. The more games that do, the more games probably will. If a game as large as ours moves, this will likely encourage other games that may be on the fence to follow suit, and hopefully mitigate some of the problems of the Dreamwidth community being smaller than the Livejournal community, because we'll all be there!
As of today, several large games have indeed made the decision to move, including campfuckudie, luceti, and singularity_rpg. However, many other games are still on the fence. We don't how that will play out right now, and can only decide what's best for our own game and hope that this works out in our favour one way or another.
Dreamwidth has all of the functionality that we have always used
LJ Login and LJ Juggler do work for Dreamwidth, too. If you're not sure how to enable it on LJ Login, just ask me and I can walk you through it, and if you use Chrome, Suki is the go-to girl!
Pretty much all of the LJ related tags that we're used to (lj-cut, lj user) still work, though there are also neutral versions (cut, user name).
Dreamwidth paid accounts are approximately equivalent to LJ paid accounts in price. Though there is currently no a la carte icons (though they are considering instituting this), a paid account on Dreamwidth has 100 icons and a premium account has 250 icons. The prices work out to approximately the same for the same number of icons, or slightly cheaper on Dreamwidth.
Livejournal - paid + 70 iconsDreamwidth - paid includes 100 icons
One Month ---$3
Two Months$7$6
Six Months$21$17.50
One Year$35$35
Also, all the functionality that LJ removed in Release 88 is still there on Dreamwidth of course.
Why We Would Not Move
Moving will be a big job and may be too disruptive to the game as a whole
This is very true, but it may not be as disruptive as you may think. Dreamwidth has now rolled out community import, and it will be available to communities the size of DramaDramaDuck very soon. The import process automatically imports pretty much all aspects of a journal - posts, comments, tags, profile, icons, EVERYTHING. The Dreamwidth staff have told us they expect DDD to take 2-3 days to import. Importing is extremely easy and just involves entering a password and checking some ticky boxes. I know how much you all love ticky boxes.
So how would moving probably take place? If it were to happen, here is a handy step-by-step guide to how I would envision it working.
- We would pick a day, say January 15th, which would be the Official Move Day
- Between now and then, we all play! There's no need to stop.
- Meanwhile, players will make new journals and be added to the community on Dreamwidth. Mods will assist players in getting invite codes if necessary and to set up their journals and make sure everyone is properly added. Players import their own journals. (Note: Dreamwidth is running a special right now, so no invite codes are needed until January 1st). Players help those of limited means to get paid accounts for those who need them. Anonysanta strikes everywhere!
- On the Official Move Day, any new posts must be made on Dreamwidth, though backtagging will still be permitted on the Livejournal version. Play starts to transition to Dreamwidth overall.
- Whenever community import becomes available to a community of our size, Mods will initiate the import of comments for all communities, and we let that run its course.
- Backtagging shifts to Dreamwidth. All the comments are there so we can just pick up where we left off!
- Maybe in a few months, we'll do a third import of the community to pick up any stragglers.
The whole process should be fairly seamless, with no need for people to 'start over', so while it is a big job for the moderators, the players shouldn't have much of an interruption in playing. We've had worse disruptions during DDoS attacks.
Dreamwidth has some functions that aren't as good/Dreamwidth is different from LJ
There are some ways in which Dreamwidth isn't as good as Livejournal:
- They require invite codes, though they do have ways of working around this. It's not hard to get invite codes, and communities like DDD would be able to get mass invite codes to hand out on an as-needed basis.
- There are fewer payment options. Again, workarounds exist for this, and the reason for the lack of Paypal option is one which I think we cannot really complain about. There are whole communities devoted to helping users who don't have credit cards get paid accounts. That is something that we as players can help each other with very easily.
- Livejournal has now rolled out editing of posts for all users, while it's only available for paid users on Dreamwidth. YMMV on this. Livejournal only did this because they removed the preview function and people got upset.
- There are no S1 journal layouts on Dreamwidth. In fact, there are fewer layout options in general, though more are being added all the time, and Dreamwidth has a community devoted to layout development by users to be added as official layouts.
- Also the HTML works a bit differently, for example, tables don't work the same way, so we will all have a bit of a learning curve about this. Suki is developing a guide to help LJers learn how to do tables on Dreamwidth, so just go to her with questions!
- Dreamwidth isn't pretty LJ blue. There is a workaround for that, though, to make it look exactly like Livejournal. And there are actually several ways that Dreamwidth can look. There is an option in your account settings, to make it purple, black with white text, or a stripped-down minimal view. So if you don't like the red, there are other options available that don't in any way affect the functionality of the site.
- Friend lists are a little different - you have to subscribe and grant access separately. It's two buttons to click when friending instead of just one, or if you use the admin console it's more text to copy (oh noes!). There is still the option to just check the comm's friend list, instead of keeping up with the FA/RL. (But as mentioned earlier, the FA/RL will be far easier to keep up with on Dreamwidth because they don't have limits).
We will lose paid time we spent already
Yes. I have done a lot of investigating of Open ID and looking at options, and there's no getting around that, unfortunately.
However, if we move, there's no reason why you can't continue to back tag on LJ until the paid time runs out, if all players involved in the thread agree, since we'll likely do an import down the line to capture any missed comments. Obviously new posts would have to go on the community to keep things organized, so players don't have to look in two places.
And quite frankly, at least this would be the last time you have to worry about losing paid time. Dreamwidth is instituting the ability to cash in unused paid time for points, which you can use to buy paid time for other accounts. I seriously screamed when I read about this. How many times have I dropped a character with paid time still left on his account and it was wasted? So many times, ydek.
Other Concerns Not Already Mentioned
Can Dreamwidth handle the additional traffic?
Signs point to yes.
And for your voting pleasure:
Poll
For this poll, only the mod account can see who voted for what option, although everyone can see the votes per option. ALSO I can't edit the poll but the bottom option should read "No, and I will drop if we move."