latest LJ fail

[cellio]

You may have seen that monstrosity of a reading page they're getting ready to unleash on everybody. (If not, click on the link in the blue banner at the top of your reading page.) In a nutshell, they're getting rid of individual-journal styling for the reading page. The new style does not work for me. Profoundly.

But that's not the main thing I wanted to post about. I've had an unused journal at Dreamwidth all along, so between this and the fact that LJ backups have been broken for a year or so (that is, I can no longer back up my journal to my own machine), I decided to import my journal to DW (keeping all the security groups, of course). Before doing so I changed my LJ password to a temporary one, and then changed it back again when the import finished 37 minutes later (wow, fast!).

That's how I found out that my original LJ password no longer meets their password requirements. It's not too simple; it's too complicated. Apparently the system is perfectly capable of storing and applying a password containing assorted punctuation characters, because I've been doing that for a while, but the "change password" form will no longer accept any punctuation. Letters and numbers, folks. How 20th-century.

Really, LJ? Security means that little to you?

Comments

[cahwyguy.livejournal.com]

I'm out there too, as cawhyguy. I don't recall whether are circles are completely mutual. I haven't moved over yet, but I certainly will move over if they keep that monstrosity of a friends page -- it is unreadable. At that point I'll import my journal and change my Wordpress blog to crosspost to DW, and let DW send things to the stragglers at LJ.

[cellio]

Got you there, yup.

[shalmestere.livejournal.com]

You may have seen that monstrosity of a reading page they're getting ready to unleash on everybody.

No, not yet....

(If not, click on the link in the blue banner at the top of your reading page.)

? I don't have a blue banner at the top of my reading page....

In any case, from what you and a couple other folks have said, it sounds as if LJ's flist is going to look like Facebook. Do Not Want. (And didn't siderea say that the LJ PTB wanted to get rid of threaded comments? DO NOT WANT!)

I also have a DW account, which I've been using as a backup archive. If enough of my LJ friends were also on DW, I might start posting there, instead....

[cellio]

Oh, interesting -- I thought everybody got that today. See this news post.

I'm trying to figure out the logistics of having friends on both DW and LJ. If LJ proceeds with the harsh (bright white background!) page with the teeny tiny fonts, I'll probably be forced to bail. I might be able to figure out how to write CSS overrides for all that, but it might just be time to cut the cord. (Part of this is figuring out if some combination of OpenID, RSS, and things I haven't thought of yet can let me read LJ people over there. The biggest barrier has always been that people are here, after all.)

[goljerp]

I've turned off the "navigation bar" which is popping up the link to this monstrosity. Not that I think it will matter, but I'm going to add a comment to the thread myself...

[shalmestere.livejournal.com]

Ah. That might explain why I haven't seen the link....

[siderea]

And didn't siderea say that the LJ PTB wanted to get rid of threaded comments?

No, siderea said that some of their recent development choices might be explained as LJ's doing everything in their power to attempt keep threaded comments, despite their cost.

[shalmestere.livejournal.com]

Oh, good--for once I'm happy to have misremembered something :-)

[siderea]

the "change password" form will no longer accept any punctuation

Ah! Thank you for alerting us.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Oh, is it LJ that's refusing to archive? I thought I'd broken it!

[cellio]

Lj changed something in their interface, yeah. Not you.

[sambeth.livejournal.com]

I tried out the new friends list page, but I didn't like it much, so I changed it right back again. It wasn't difficult to do, even for a techno-fool like me - I just pressed the button that says something like 'go back to old style'.

I'll be miffed, though, if they remove the old option after beta testing - what's the point of customising your journal if you have to read everything in pale blue anyway? I mean, my own journal will stay the same, but I'm not usually reading my own journal - I already know what I've said! Much more often, I'm reading my friends list, so that's the page I want customised.

[cellio]

Right now you can freely switch back and forth (though I don't know anybody who's done more than just those two clicks). It sounds like they're planning to take away that choice, which would suck.

Apparently the folks in charge believe that we choose our journal styles as a means of self-expression, and what matters is how the world sees our individual journals. Um, no, or at least not for me -- I know that some people think my style is ugly, but its primary purpose in life is to make it easier for me to read (while not being too much of a hinderance to others). Besides, LJ users have the option to force their style on it, same as I force my style onto everybody else.

[magid.livejournal.com]

What Sambeth said, pretty much. And infinite scroll is not something I want on LJ. Nor the return of those awful scissors with lj-cuts.

(You were the first person I thought of when I read the post, wondering if you'd be able to read at all.)

I'm already on DW, same username. I've mostly been posting there and cross-posting here (just because I can set up the defaults so I only have to post once), but tending to read on LJ, since that's where my friends mostly are. I'd regret losing not only some friends, but communities and feeds I've set up.

Why fix what isn't broke?

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

I suspect it's not a "fix" so much as a "What are some easy things we could do that might let us capture users from other social media sites?" with not enough attention to what they'd lose.

[cellio]

(You were the first person I thought of when I read the post, wondering if you'd be able to read at all.)

They've made some of the same design choices they did for the individual-entry pages, which forced me to spend too many hours then to get those pages readable for me. That's when I switched to forcing my style on individual entries; until then I was reading journals and the reading list with my style but using the site style for individual pages because the threading was easier to see. I'm not up to writing my own style, so I settled for this one where the only clue is subtle indentation.

I've got you on my DW list.

[cjsherwood.livejournal.com]

I'm on DW, as sine_nomine, fwiw.

And I'm planning on migrating pretty entirely to there, though I still read here.

[cellio]

Thanks! It's especially hard to find the people with different user names between the two sites.

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

I don't find it awful, but I am moderately annoyed that they pulled a g+ and have really narrowed the text area in favor of more empty space. (Or maybe they just made it fixed-width?)

[cellio]

Yeah, I don't like that on G+ either. :-( What is so freaking hard about the design principle "use all and only the browser real-estate I give you"? Don't pad things with extra whitespace, and don't make me scroll horizontally. Bleh.

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

That password restriction is bogus. Why should they even care if it's Unicode? It's all just bytes.

Financial institutions are the worst. The more secure they should be the more likely they are to force just numbers and letters, with some arbitrary secure-looking-if-you-suck thing like "digit must be in the middle". I don't like my bank accounts being protected by case-insensitive [0-9a-z]. So weak.