*mutter*grumble* LiveJournal

[lethargic_man]

I just posted to LiveJournal. It told me the server had a message for me:

Your password cannot contain symbols such as @,_, (),etc. Your password is too easy to guess. It's recommended that you change it, otherwise you risk having your journal hijacked. Please see http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=71 for LiveJournal.com's password rules, and visit http://www.livejournal.com/changepassword.bml to change your password.

This is a load of utter horseradish. Firstly, the presence of non-alphabetical symbols makes my password more difficult to figure out, not easier. Indeed, the linked password rules say:

Your LiveJournal password must meet the following requirements:
[...]

• At least 1 number or symbol.
• At least 1 character that is not a number.

So, LiveJournal get your <quack>ing act together and inform your right hand what your left hand is doing.

Also, the hell you say my password is easy to guess. It's not based on an English dictionary word or a name, a date, email address or anything similar. I reckon you're talking out of your server's posterior here.

And whilst you're at it, I have no objection to you introducing the new friends page format, but I damn well hope you're not going to disable the old one.

Comments

[liv]

Everything I've seen in the discussions of this suggest that LJ definitely is planning to disable the old friends page. If the whole point is to make the site easier to maintain and add new features, they're really unlikely to be maintaining the old system in parallel, unfortunately. It may also be of interest that they've pretty much gutted their US office recently, including all the customer support people, so they're really really giving up on supporting the anglophone site.

The password thing is really odd. I am getting a lot of weird errors from LJ at the moment, including taking several attempts to post comments. It's hard to tell whether you've just got a really badly written error message, or if you shouldn't be seeing that error message at all and it's a server glitch somewhere.

[ewx]

Their outbound RSS feeds have been very unreliable lately too - often producing a near-empty HTML document and sometimes an HTTP redirect loop.

[green_knight]

I haven't seen the new friendspage yet - my style still shows up as ever, and I don't want to mess with it in case I can't turn it back - but if it's anything like the horror that is the new comments page, it will be near unusuable. (The Arial-on-white design gives me headaches. Which I never get from any other computing activity.)

But they... keep doing that. Introducing changes that are cumbersome and breaking usability and eating resources (loading all icons? And now loading all 200 icons _in the order I uploaded them_ so I have to remember the title or scroll through every single one? (I can remember approximately where on the scroll list they live. Kinesthetic and all that.)

But thousands of people saying 'ARGH, TURN IT OFF' haven't left the slightest impression on LJ. They keep rolling out changes without testing them, without consulting their userbase, and I've had enough. I'm still on LJ because I have a few friends I don't want to lose touch with, but I am thoroughly pissed off with their attitude.

[lethargic_man]

Well, why do you think I moved to DW? Unfortunately, this may have backfired in terms of effect on LJ, as now if I complain, I've lost my more valued voice as a paying customer.

[liv]

There is a rumour buried deep in one of the comment threads, but originating from an employee, that come 2013 they're going to get rid of paid accounts altogether. No idea how that will work, but... interesting times are coming, I think.

[lethargic_man]

interesting times

In the Chinese sense?

[iddewes]

Yes, I thought that message was weird too. My password is not that simple either.
NOBODY seems to like the new friends page.

[iddewes]

Apparently the majority of users are still American though (even if ZhZh IS incredibly popular in Russia) so it seems a bit daft to give up on the Anglophone site...

[lethargic_man]

Users or active users? There's almost certainly a big difference given the number of people on my f-list who used to post and no longer do.

[iddewes]

I just found the same thing on the Russian support page (thought I'd check what the Russian users thought of the changes - I don't think they like them either). It said they are going to change it in the spring/summer.

[bluepork]

Thinking about this, I'm not sure why you don't just host your blog on a server of your own (or a cheap hosting service), using wordpress or something like it. Then you could have complete control.

[lethargic_man]

Thinking about this, I'm not sure why you don't just host your blog on a server of your own (or a cheap hosting service), using wordpress or something like it. Then you could have complete control.

...and zero readership. At least using LJ or DW makes it easier for other people to read my blog along with many others, so I get readers. And, for all its faults, LJ still has a larger user base then DW, which is why I maintain a presence there at all, rather than retreating to just DW.

[bluepork]

That answer makes no sense. Most of your readers are people you know, who you can redirect.

If you are worried about anonymous readers finding you, you could cross post and redirect for a while.

Your site would still be searchable from Google.

Finally, I think most keen blog readers use an rss aggregator. I use Google Reader, and add or remove blogs as I come across them in general browsing. The idea of browsing a specific blog website to find stuff I'm interested in strikes me as absurd. But that's just me. It's your blog so you host it as you wish. If I were using someone else's service (for free, I might add), I wouldn't complain publicly if they change the format or otherwise (mis) manage it. I'm sure they have a feedback method...

[lnr]

Apparently in some styles there is a link at the top of the page to try the new style, and the new style has a link at the top to turn it back. If your style doesn't have that link (mine doesn't either) you can manually try a preview here:

http://lnr.livejournal.com/feed?ncrnd=790307

(Where you need to change lnr to your username)

You can definitely change back because I did.

I'm not a big fan of the fixed width, or so much extra space around each entry, or the extra stuff at the top given I've deliberately turned that off for my style. The infinite scrolling is something I could probably get used to though may be irritating in practice in ways I haven't worked out yet. The fact the friends page is then completely different from the profile/recent entries/archive pages is also weird - but I suspect they intend to update those at some point too :/

As a permanent member on LJ I largely have as little voice as a free user.

[lnr]

Personally I use livejournal feeds as a way of aggregating external blogs :)

For me livejournal is much much more about *reading* than it is about posting though, and even if I were to move my own posts to another site I'd still want to continue reading LJ and DW. Which is one reason why them changing the way I read posts could be so irritating.

And with the best will in the world if I were to move - even if I make an LJ-feed and DW-feed of wherever I moved to - there would be a lot of people, whose comments I value, who simply wouldn't follow me.

[lethargic_man]

What lnr said (except that I use DW now to aggregate blogs, not LJ). But I've already had one person refuse to follow me from LJ to DW, which is why I keep my posts crossposted on LJ. Migrating to something else entirely would just exacerbate the problem.

Besides, why should I migrate. I am happy with DW; just frustrated (along with everyone else) with LJ.

[green_knight]

Thanks for the preview, you can turn it back now. My eyes, they bleed.

This is even *worse* than I expected, and I expected bad. It'll be impossible to pick up the point where you stopped reading, (Adding insult to injury,, ther'es an 'up' button, but no 'down' button - yes, I really like reading EVERYTHING on my flist. My eyes hurt, the handy colour-coding for 'who is writing, who do I need to pay attention to' is gone,

But without this, I would not have found the Stone Soup Blog - and now I am utterly intrigued by recipes that include guide to variations and a troubleshooting manual.

[green_knight]

Even though I am reading blogposts on an RSS reader (my LJ/DW flist/rlist), I find outside blogs a hassle - you need to sign up, and often log in, and you don't get comments emailed unless you're lucky, and you can't reload the page and see whether there's a vibrant discussion with many new comments going on... I comment far less on outside blogs than I do on LJ/DW, and when I'm low on spoons I comment hardly ever.

Also, on the LJ/DW platform it's very easy to meet new people and add them to your circle - following commenters on blogs is difficult and often impossible, so the networking aspect of social media takes a nosedive.

[green_knight]

I *know* that there are people who won't follow me from LJ to DW, but if this new page becomes mandatory, I'll shut down LJ to read only those few people I want to stay in touch with, with no further comments or crossposts. I already, if something is crossposted, will stick to DW, but I shall be even more rigorous about it.

[liv]

OK, the password thing is a bug. But it's somewhat ominous that LJ is able to see a plaintext version of your password to be able to tell whether it's secure or insecure, regardless of whether it's currently reporting wrongly.

[lethargic_man]

Mmmm, hadn't thought of that. Though when you submit a password is it not submitted in plaintext (albeit probably encrypted as part of an HTTPS request)? If so, if the LJ server hashes your submitted password and it matches, it then (temporarily, one hopes!) knows plaintext version of the stored, encrypted password is the one you've just submitted.

Meanwhile, in the latest installment in the LJ changes saga, LJ have sent me a message saying there's a new announcement about paid accounts, but when I tried to follow the link it said I hadn't permission to read it.