*kicks LJ*

[ratcreature]

I know they have server trouble, but this is annoying. I'm in the middle of reading a multichapter story there, but it takes always five attempts or so to get the thing to respond, and just now it doesn't at all for me. *grumble*

In other news, AO3 has a post asking what features you would like to see in your ideal fanart archive, as they plan to expand from just fiction eventually. There are many ideas already in comments, but if you are a fanartist or like looking at fanart, you should chime in too.

Comments

[sholio]

Gah, I know. Like I've said before, I'm a creature of massive inertia, and, for a number of reasons that there's no point in going into here, I want to stay on LJ as my main blog-base. So what do they do? They make it nearly impossible to use! And it's been this way off and on for a month -- I know they have reasons, but way to make me want to move on, guys. (It's why I rarely post to ff.net anymore -- I was loyal for a lot of years after most of fandom moved on, but it got to the point where there were just too many hoops to jump through. I'd probably still have that as my main fic archive if it wasn't such an unreliable pain in the ass.)

[ratcreature]

Yeah, LJ's been slow a lot recently for me too, but right now it's even worse, not just slow, but mostly dead. This is worse than IJ and that is run as a hobby. I'd be happy if fandom would just be completely on DW, but most of the active communities are still on LJ. However with it now never loading for me, I'm considering to subscribe to feeds of communities on DW instead. So far I stuck with reading LJ comms on LJ (because I'd go there for commenting and such), but the idea to subscribe to a feed that maybe has better luck to fetch content from them than I do seems better and better. I mean, the crossposts go still through, even if nothing loads for me, so by using DW I can actually post to LJ even though the site is not functional for me.

ETA: also the notifications seem perpetually unreliable. Like the author I work with for the Trekreversebang chose to contact me through LJ messages instead of email, and I got theirs, but they never got a notification of my reply (which I sent the same way), and thought I hadn't reacted yet, and not wanting to be pushy I waited almost two weeks before emailing to ask them in turn. A total mess because LJ is broken.

[sholio]

Yeah; it's deeply frustrating because a business this large, with this many income streams, should not be having these problems. My understanding (could be wrong) is that ONTD has basically broken their server, and they're moving it to its own dedicated server, and once they do that, it should be back to "normal" operation. But it's very frustrating.

The main reason I don't want to leave LJ is that, since I have two blogs (this one and my all-personal-stuff-all-the-time one), I've been able to run a sort of experiment: the personal blog has been cross-posting for a year now, and I've dangled DW codes in front of my LJ flist on that blog, and talked about DW's features, and so forth. The result? No one's moved; all the conversation still happens on the LJ side. Also, I really really hate crossposting, because I'm a chronic editer, and I can never seem to let a post sit until I've edited it a half-dozen times for typos and minor word choices and such. (And yes, I'm trying to learn to use the preview window, but that's proceeding slowly, because I've been doing it one way for five years, and I don't change easily.) I don't think it would annoy me so much if it was possible to turn off the cross-post notifications, but you can't, and it really irritates me to have my inbox filling up with 5 or 7 crosspost notifications on each post.

So, yeah, these are little things. But the simple fact is that I've been doing two blogs two different ways for a year, and from the perspective of what works for me as a user, even though I prefer DW as a platform and I like its features, I vastly prefer the single-blog user experience, and I'm not unhappy enough with LJ (yet) to basically decimate my social circle and rebuilt a new one by moving to all-DW posting -- which I strongly suspect is what would happen, because it's a similar situation on this blog to the other one: a mostly-LJ flist that shows no particular inclination to move. But if LJ keeps freaking breaking all the time, it's not like I can use it anyway, and moving won't be as big of a deal ...

... er, sorry for the tl;dr.

[ratcreature]

I find the xposting notices annoying too, but yesterday I submitted a suggestion that it should only be notify you for errors, and the moderator informed me that there actually already is a bug for this. It is planned to make the xposting notifications something you can deselect in your settings and then you'll only get errors. No time table yet, but the ton of crosspost notifications won't be here forever.

[sholio]

Oh, really? *perks* I would love that; the notices are just an annoyance to me, not a useful feature. The thought of asking for it hadn't occurred to me; I guess I'd assumed it was in there because most people wanted it.

[ratcreature]

I hang out a lot in dw_suggestions and have submitted a couple. Basically whenever I notice something that bugs me I complain there asking for new features *g*. I never did that on LJ because the suggestions comm there seemed somewhat intimidating, but this one is nice.

And some of my suggestions have been moved to bugzilla to be implemented eventually, and some are even now on the site already. Like in the style preview, that you can now also preview your reading page in the new style, not just the recent entries, or that other fields besides the main entry are saved when you restore a draft. These bothered me and I made a suggestion and now it's fixed. It's nice to feel like you can help shape the functions you want.