Perm accounts going away?

[esprix]

Anyone have any further information on the news that paid and/or permanent accounts may be going away or changed dramatically? Seen here:

http://lj-releases.livejournal.com/79480.html?thread=9725048#t9725048

Comments

[samanosukesgirl]

That is not what will be happening -- no accounts will be canceled or revoked, no already-purchased paid time or paid features will be lost or anything like that. What is happening, is that we will be making some changes to the existing account structure next year. That is what these comments were referring to. This will involve changing things so users have a standard LiveJournal account to which they then can add the paid/extra features that they want separately (or feature packages/sets). The concept of buying something that's called a "paid account" is what will be removed -- extra features will be done as add-ons and add-on packages. Existing paid or permanent accounts at that time will be treated as premium/elite accounts that will have access to even more features than exist right now.

http://lj-releases.livejournal.com/79629.html

[cahwyguy]

Of course, they never say what a premium/elite account is, or more importantly, whether any of the features of a premium/elite account will ever expire. Of course, even if the permanent accounts remain permanent, we're still stuck with the new "news feed".

I express my thoughts in more detail at http://cahighways.org/wordpress/?p=6600 (which is echoed onto my LJ, but please comment on the Wordpress blog).

[ravan]

If I have to try to read that horrible "feed" thing, instead of seeing my friends pages and journal entries in my style, I will just crosspost from DW, and turn off commenting here. What's the point of having people comment here if I can't read it? Seriously, glaring whitespace, migraine blue, sans serif fonts and horrible, ugly layout with floaty widgets gives me a headache.

I tried it for all of 20 seconds. I couldn't even make out the individual entries, the text ran together, I only spotted a couple recognizable user icons in a sea of crap.

[esprix]

I agree, the new friends feed is atrocious. I come here because it's NOT Facebook or Tumblr...

[likelydisaster]

Related to the new friends page: I don't even have the option to use the beta version. Is it because I am using a custom layout? All I know is that there's no little bar at the top of my friends page inviting me to try it.

[elyssa]

You need to have the toolbar enabled in your style to get the prompt to switch.

[qfemale]

Ah that explains it. I don't even want to try the beta after reading all those comments...