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

[pentapus.livejournal.com]

*nods* I actually meant to end my comment by saying, "This is a big pet peeve, and I know it's a pet peeve. And that there's probably more pragmatic reasons involved in doing it than highlighting the comment feature in a way that feels tacky to me. I don't actually click a story and say, 'Wow, I'm not going to comment because this is one of Those Irritating People.' I had intended to say that while this irritates me--and it really does--it's a pet peeve. I don't feel any urge to make statements like, 'And that's why No One Should Do This. Here is the Proper Way.' It's just--it does annoy me. I don't want you to feel any pressure to do it some other if you have good reasons to do it your way. And thanks for pointing those reasons, while I did think there had to be better reasons to do it--because it's not like people new to lj are the only ones who do it--but I hadn't worked out the specific reasoning.

Of course, I didn't say any of that. I couldn't figure out how to say it concisely or clearly, and well, my comment did reflect how I felt about it, so I just left it. Which I think made me sound a lot more up in arms about it.