another random pet peeve post...

[ratcreature]

When people link to their journal posts containing stories or art, some link not the "plain" entry, but to the "reply mode" version, i.e. you get an URL with "?mode=reply" at the end, a comment form below, and don't see any previous comments. Also, and that is the main reason why I hate the practice, the title of the browser window will be "Post Comment" rather than the subject line of the entry, which commonly is the LJ name plus the title of the work. I get the idea behind linking to the reply form-- people think it encourages comments to have the comment field right there, but the downside is, one, that if you open links in tabs (like when you click several potentially interesting links on your f-list while scrolling down) you can't see in your tab what you have open to easily click the tab to pick it to read, and two, even more annoying for me, if you bookmark the page you won't get the subject line as link text but will have to edit that link text line manually, and edit the URL manually to get the plain one, though that is quicker as you just have to delete a bit.

I bookmark almost every story I finish reading and tag them. Normally I can highlight the summary, click the bookmark button and get the right link text (provided the author didn't put "yay! fic" or something random in their fanfic subject line, which is another annoyance) plus the highlighted summary as description, and just add the tags, whereas with the reply mode link, I highlight the summary, click the bookmark button, then get the wrong link text, have to edit the URL to get a plain bookmark, click back to the window itself to copy the subject line, click back to the tagging dialog, delete the "Post Comment" link text and paste in the right subject. So it is two clicks, two deletions and one c&p action more effort, which, unless the story or art was very nice, puts me in a frame of mind to skip the commenting this was meant to encourage.

Is anyone else annoyed every time they land on a reply page when clicking a link rather than the journal entry proper?

Comments

[secretrebel.livejournal.com]

Is anyone else annoyed every time they land on a reply page when clicking a link rather than the journal entry proper?

I am! I hates it. But I always figured ppl who do it are pixel-stained techno peasants who don't know any better. It didn't occur to me it was deliberate.

[ratcreature]

I'm pretty sure it is intentional, because I've noticed several people who are quite competent with linking, embedding stuff and html coding and such in general, do this consistently in their posts on notice boards and communities or when linking to previous parts in WIPs.

[secretrebel.livejournal.com]

Hmm, maybe they think it is more polite to link the plain fic without a chain of squee afterwards? That to link the comments would be tooting their own horn? But then, producing the 'post reply' link is soliciting comentary which is also horn tooting.

[liviapenn.livejournal.com]

But then, producing the 'post reply' link is soliciting comentary which is also horn tooting.

If there was a way to hide comments without including the big "post comment" form at the end, I bet people would use it more often than not. (Say, if there was a way to put comments somewhere else entirely, maybe like the Yuletide archive.)

I think a lot of people want to post their fic in a "clean" format, to stand alone, all by itself, and the only way to do that is mode-reply-- the fact that the comment form is more apparent in this format is a *side effect*, not the main reason they do it.

Basically, I think this is a conflict between LJ-as-fiction-archive and LJ-as-social-tool, which makes sense, because it wasn't ever meant to function as a fiction archive, so to make it work as one (ie, to get the story by itself on a page, like on any other fiction archive) you have to use workarounds.