Comments | moth2fic: Absent friends (and communities)

moth2fic

Absent friends (and communities)

Jan 04, 2013 16:43

Forget about the debate about the aesthetics or general functionality of the new profile page. Or the new update page. Or the friends pages. This is a bigger/stranger worry.

I needed to check something in a comm that was only formed during 2012 (ruby_story_swap) and went, as usual, to my profile to click on them. I had the new profile page open and the comm was ( Read more... )

personal

Comments 32

damerel January 4 2013, 17:22:42 UTC

I couldn't remember if I'd joined any new communities within the last year, so I've just joined one in order to check this. Sure enough, it showed up on the old style profile, but not the new one.

Thanks for the heads-up; I'm heading over to LJ support to make a report, for what good that will do.

moth2fic January 4 2013, 20:50:13 UTC

See comments below for a partial explanation but it isn't the whole story, for me, and I don't like it anyway!

damerel January 4 2013, 21:39:54 UTC

Thank you for that. I did click on the dots when experimenting, but expected to see anything not at the front of the list before it was expanded to be appended to the end, not for the whole wretched thing to be reordered. I'm seriously unimpressed with LJ. Again.

moth2fic January 5 2013, 00:09:03 UTC

I had clicked on the dots, too, and had initially succeeded in merely hiding my entire f'list!! That's the point at which I posted about it all. I can now click and get the hidden names - but that's insane. Apparently (see below again) only the earliest 50 show up. That means, I think, that I must consider culling my f'list because I rarely communicate with some of the 'earliest' of my friends - I or they or both have moved on. The same, presumably, applies to the comms, and as some are ones I only friended for the very occasional glimpse, I have done as another of my f'list has suggested and taken a screen cap of the full list. That way I can always remind myself of the exact name and search them, but remove them from my profile. But we shouldn't have to think of ways round it all!! It worked nicely!

I get the feeling that I came up against loading problems at the same time as new page problems which made it all much worse, but even so - I think they're mad!

rubyelf January 4 2013, 17:34:08 UTC

You should probably make a service report... they don't pay any attention to the comments on the posts.

moth2fic January 4 2013, 20:51:46 UTC

You're right, but I thought I'd check out with my f'list first - you guys are usually all-knowing, between you, and I don't want to complain about something unnecessarily!

aletheiafelinea January 4 2013, 17:35:14 UTC

I prefer inbox notifications and bookmarks anyway, but my profile seems to miss nothing in the both versions. Still, I don't like the sound of what you report. *worried*

with the number of comments they're getting ... I'm not hopeful
How about the Support Requests Board?

moth2fic January 4 2013, 20:55:56 UTC

Yeah, I'll try them if things don't improve - I am still having very slow loading problems which might be a contributing factor - there's a partial explanation from somebody else but it hasn't quite sorted it for me. It might, when things are back to normal!

byslantedlight January 4 2013, 17:45:02 UTC

In the new profile page, did you click on the 3 dots at the end of the comms/friends list to expand it? Oddly enough, in the unexpanded version it doesn't just go up to a letter of the alphabet and stop, it seems to include a particular selection of friends/comms all the way through the alphabet, but miss others out (perhaps based on when they were friended, I've not checked - but if so it's longer than 2012. Maybe it depends on how many friends you have to start with...)

My guess is that it's to save space on profile pages, so that information you want to see is more concisely visible. I'd prefer to see all my friends listed at once, of course - but presumably other people want the opposite (in fact I remember whinging on both sides in various lj news/etc posts, so...)

If it's not got to do with using the three dots to expand your friends/comms lists, then... huh. *g ( ... )

morganmuffle January 4 2013, 18:47:06 UTC

So the 50 it chooses are the 50 with the lowest userIDs (ie. the 50 oldest) which is really really weird and stupid but that's what they said when I asked.

byslantedlight January 4 2013, 18:58:49 UTC

Ah, okay - thanks! Which I find kind of coolly interesting, as a historian-type, but I wonder why they chose that selection too... I was just really pleased it wasn't alphabetical to be honest, cos that always looks so partial and fragmented... Maybe it's just one of those things that was likely to be so evenly divided, opinion-wise, that they picked an essentially random option...

moth2fic January 4 2013, 21:10:03 UTC

It might be interesting but at least if it was alphabetical there would be a sort of heads-up that part of the list was missing and maybe accessible somewhere! As it is, it looks as if I need to go and cull my f'list and my comms list because the older stuff includes people and comms I haven't communicated with in five years or more.

Thread 9

anjak_j January 4 2013, 20:24:08 UTC

I screencapped my profile page in the old style and compared the two side by side - all my communities, even the ones I joined in the last year, are accounted for. I'm going to keep the screencap until I'm completely sure that I have everyone when they eventually remove the old style profile; I'd recommend all users save a version of the old style page in some form just in case.

With regards to the formatting of your posts - that happened to me once and it was because the 'Disable Auto-Formatting' box had randomly become checked. Such a pain in the ass, especially if the post is a long one.

moth2fic January 4 2013, 21:13:29 UTC

That's an excellent suggestion about screencapping the profile page. *rushes off to do just that*

I suppose the random checking must have happened - that is an absolute pain!!

anjak_j January 5 2013, 10:48:55 UTC

I've only had the random checkbox issue once thankfully... though I've recently started using Semagic to post - the new comment page is so ugly. I made a Stylish style to move the ridiculous floating metadata back to where they used to be, and to tidy up some things that really irk me about that page. However, I made it just to make that page usable and not migraine-inducing. I did the same with the profile page and default comment pages too - I really hate those blue-to-white transitions LJ's suddenly fallen in love with.

moth2fic January 5 2013, 11:09:04 UTC

I can imagine having to do that if you get migraines. I find the new look quite visually stressful and I think a lot of people do. It is a mystery as to why LJ has chosen it! As you know, I prefer DW but of course there are lots of people - and comms - over here.

I will now look out for the checkbox.

Thread 8