minor LJ annoyance

[cellio]

In response to an LJ support request, I was directed to the suggestions community. Once there, I followed all the instructions, including reviewing the community memories and recent entries to make sure my suggestion wasn't a duplicate. Then I submitted a suggestion to the moderated community, filling out their detailed form completely.

Six days later, I received a rejection whose entire content was "This was already rejected by staff when it was proposed before." No hints about what the issues were or where I might have divined the fact that this was a repeat suggestion. (And, well, I do think it was a reasonable suggestion, or I wouldn't have submitted it.)

This does not motivate me to try in the future. I wonder if that was the goal.

Comments

[siderea]

Perhaps you should suggest an alternate way to handle suggestions? :)

What was you suggestion?

[cellio]

Here's the suggestion I submitted:

Time: 2004-07-22 06:34
Subject: broaden "use my style" option to all entry page views

Short, concise description of the idea:
The user profile offers an option to enforce one's style on pages
linked from the friends page; this suggestion is to support style
enforcement from all single-page views (e.g. after posting a comment,
when viewing from memories, when following a link to a specific entry).

Full description of the idea:
I think these are all the ways one can view a single entry:
comments link from friends page;
post link from friends page;
page refresh after posting a comment (either from friends
page or from within the entry page);
link from memories;
URL for specific entry (e.g. linked in another entry);
comments or post link from recent entries page;
link from calendar page.

I can see an argument that in the last two cases the style
should not be changed, because you are already viewing that
user's style if you're reading his recent entries or calendar.
On the other hand, if a journal you want to read uses an
unreadable style, you have to add ?style=mine to the URL
manually for each page view, which is a PITA if reading more
than a few entries. If I want to check out a journal before
adding it, the current behavior makes that difficult.

An ordered list of benefits:

• Supports easy viewing of pages with hard-to-read styles,
  without having to manually add ?style=mine to the URL every time.
• Allows users who want it to have a consistent site experience,
  avoiding the surprise upon page refresh after posting a comment or
  when browsing memories.

An ordered list of problems/issues involved

• I don't know how specialized the current style-enforcement
  code is. Is it easy to broaden?
• I don't think many users would object to this
  change, which is only visible if they've asked to enforce
  their own style in the first place, but I could be wrong.

An organized list, or a few short paragraphs detailing
suggestions for implementation

• Whatever code is already being used to do this for links
  from friends pages would have to be hooked in in several
  other places. I don't know the structure of the code, so
  I can't comment specifically on that.
• The option on the profile page would need to be reworded;
  it currently says "View comment pages in your journal
  style?" (and the description refers to the friends-page link).

[goljerp]

I think it's a great idea! In fact, I was thinking about it recently...

I use iCab 2.9.8 to view LJ. It's a great browser in many ways, but it doesn't deal with CSS very well yet. Which means that the new-fangled styles look like crud. The older style, however, works just fine, and that's what I use for my pages. Why shouldn't I see it everywhere, automatically?

[cellio]

Yup. For me, the issue is that some people have "unhelpful" taste in fonts and colors, with the result that I can't read pages in their styles. So fine, I won't read their main journal pages, but if I'm looking at a page in my style already and I post a comment, I should still be in my style when we're done. And memories seem like they belong with my settings, not the other person's; I'm viewing them from my memories page, after all.

So it's all about expectation-management during site navigation. As I said in my original suggestion, the only cases where I think the journal style should dominate are when following links from the journal itself. And remember, this is only if I've bothered to express a preference for my own style to begin with; it needn't inconvenience those who prefer to experience the variety that is LJ.

Yeah, I know -- preaching to the choir.