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

[ratcreature]

I have no problem with people wanting comments, and try to do a formatting and presentation that encourages people leaving them. I want comments too, after all. And while I read comments I wouldn't care whether I see what others said first or later, and I don't mind authors linking to offsite copies if they rather have a plainer presentation, but the mode-reply is just so inconvenient for bookmarking.

[liviapenn.livejournal.com]

I have no problem with people wanting comments, and try to do a formatting and presentation that encourages people leaving them. I want comments too, after all.

But... the whole point of my comment was that people *don't just do this to get more comments*. They do it because they like the formatting, or because it's more convenient to load the page, or *download* the page. Maybe *some* people do it for more comments, but like I said above, if there was a way to post a story and have comments-not-showing AND no blatant Gimme Comments Comment Box, I bet people *would use that*. Because it's... not always about the comments. And I get that it's a pain for bookmarking, which is actually something I hadn't thought about before and is actually a good reason to not do that, unlike "People will assume you are tacky" which just makes me want to do it more. ;)