mind_over_metal | (no subject)

[Warning] Note that there may be triggering material in any of the links here, particularly in user icons.

Text lifted harmlessly from

socchan, who shamelessly ganked from

filladex, who shamelessly jacked from

russia_sushi, who shamelessly jacked from

capkink.

In the recent LJ news post LJ-staff sneakily mentions that "Comment pages have been redesigned!" with no further information and that these changes will go live on Tuesday, 20th Dec 2011. These changes had been communicated to Russian language user-base for some time in their Russian beta-site, but this post was the first indication of the change for English-language users.

These changes means NO MORE VISIBLE SUBJECT LINES TO COMMENTS starting Tuesday, which means most meme activity will become difficult if not impossible. After pages of comments there has been only one message from the LJ-staff which tells users to switch to S2 style if they want to see comment headings. The S2 styles, which are not only unable to handle large numbers of comments but are also not very accessible to everyone. The only reason given for this change, is that (no subject) on collapsed comments entries with no heading looks ugly, and that "less than 1% user base uses headings".

So, if you don't like this change and specially if you have paid journals, please go and make your voice heard, please please try to remain calm and polite and rational, and remember that ficcing and RPing and Memeing is not the only thing that goes on, on LJ and that LJ provides a very important platform for the Russian political blogosphere, (which is not very happy with this change either). But please make you voice heard (and spread the word if possible).

For a screencap of the new comment form, go here [Russian language] (via

ceilidh in this comment on the news post). Why yes, it does look like it would take more time to load, in addition to making accessibility more difficult!

Polite comments requesting LJ staff to change their mind on this matter are being encouraged at both the news post and comment in question.