All change is stupid and evil.

[theweaselking]

Anyone else finding they can't make Comments, *at all*, with the new LJ comment code? The "post a new comment" button stays grayed out forever for me.

(Also: It's animated! And SLOW! And the controls hide themselves until you hover! These are all TERRIBLE interface decisions!)

EDIT, since I can't make comments: The button doesn't switch away from grayed-out, for me. Which means it's almost certainly depending on a script that *isn't* hosted on livejournal or ljtoys. Which is INSANELY STUPID.

I'm tempted to go through one at a time enabling scripts to find which one it is. I'm also tempted to just say "fuckit" and take another crack at making a non-unusably-fugly Dreamwidth. I've tried that before, and failed.

EDIT2: It was a bad interaction between the Greasemonkey script I use to eliminate Facebook "like" buttons and the livejournal comment code. Disable that script, problem solved.

Comments

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

I've not had any problem. The Post a new comment box is grayed out unless I type something into the comment box. At that point it becomes clickable.

[kjn]

And everything is in Arial!

[scifantasy.livejournal.com]

I find that it works, but I agree that it's a horrible interface.

[rifkafox.livejournal.com]

Seems to work for me...

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

A-ha! Now it says "add a comment" and goes live, instead of the "post a new comment" grayed-out button I had before.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Greasemonkey!

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

No, wait, now with Greasemonkey re-enabled, it's still working.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

And now I can comment again.

[frith]

Thus, your difficulty was tempoary and requires no change to your modus operandi on your end?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

It's a pain in the ass and I hate the new style, and I need to change my script because de-crapifying pages is good.

But yes. It's working.

[ladysisyphus.livejournal.com]

Whoo, that took (via beeblebabe's direction) going into the journal style, clicking 'customize your theme', and selecting 'no' for 'disable customized comments', but I seem to look like it did before -- and what's even better, I CAN FUCKING USE IT.

I wouldn't so much mind the new system if it were usable at all, but since it's not? Fat chance.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

That's an S2 thing. I don't HAVE those options.

All S2 styles are unbearably hideous, though.

[ladysisyphus.livejournal.com]

I know, I just switched over this morning. At least S2 Generator looks enough like S1 Generator that I ... can deal. -ish.

...I already miss having the lj comment page set as default, though, let me tell you.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

They're apparently making an S2 style that's identical to the old default. But for whatever stupid reason they didn't have it ready on launch day. And I don't know how non-paid users are going to use an S2 style.

[frith]

Giving this a whirl. I use Firefox 3.5 (if it ain't broke, I don't fix it). As a rule, I keep Javascript off at all times when on LiveJournal. OS is win 7. On the page of this entry (#4096239 in the address bar) there is a reply link. I enabled cookies (Yeah, I keep cookies off too), click it, presto, a dialog box for my comment, which I am writing in now. There's a "Post a new comment" radio button and below that all six of my icons. I don't see a spellcheck option. Pressing "Post a new comment" now.

[frith]

It worked.

[ice-hesitant.livejournal.com]

So, you use software with known security holes, but also do inconvenient things of dubious benefit to mitigate?

[frith]

Yes, yes I do. ^_^ Security holes should result in viruses and spyware. I don't get viruses and I very rarely get spyware. It has only been very benign spyware at that. The last time I got a worm it was around 2001, I think it was the KAK worm on my Win 95 OS. My laptop works like a charm, my browser is very stable, what more could I ask for?

I have considered upgrading FireFox, but I have been put off by reports of browser instability. Has this been rectified, or has everyone switch to Chrome?

[ice-hesitant.livejournal.com]

I've actually just switched back to FF8 (FF9 as of a minute ago) from Chrome because Chrome chose to remove a feature I depend on (Side Tabs). The Tree Style Tab extension is an ok approximation of it on FF.

I haven't had any stability issues with Firefox. In my experience, stability issues have more to do with badly written extensions or outdated plugins (Flash, Java, etc).

[ice-hesitant.livejournal.com]

There's a plugin version checker here: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/plugincheck/

[frith]

Thanks! I'm going to check it out. In conversations I've evesdropped on about other people having trouble with Firefox getting slow or crashing when multiple tabs are open, the solution appeared to be to clear the history, which is something I do religiously as a matter of course anyway.

[frith]

Eight plugins, all fine just the way they are. And the site is pimping adware to put on your site to bug visitors about their "outdated" plugins. No thanks. 8^(

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

Are you able to select icons with Javascript disabled? I'm not, as the whole icon selector thing is a Javascript nightmare.

[frith]

Yes, selecting an icon is a breeze. Since I only have six, I don't have a long load time either. What is interesting is that with cookies off, none of the comments posted here since before about 11 am this morning get displayed. The count goes up and I know there's stuff here I'm not seeing, but the content does not show. This is an interesting variant on material on my reading page only showing many hours after it was posted (when browsed with cookies off). I suspect this is another way to fight DDOS and spam.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

How bizarre all around.

[frith]

BTW, new wrinkle: I hope you backed up your journal on Dreamwidth. LiveJournal has also deleted all comments in our journals from people who have deleted their accounts. I checked. I chose au hazard a post in my journal from October 13 2006. There happened to be two comments there from an old friend who has deleted her journal and vanished. Now her comments on LJ are gone, but they are still there in my DW copy.

\

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

I thought they said they weren't doing that due to the whole ext_### workaround.

[frith]

Since you said you thought they weren't going to do that I went back and checked more old entries. After checking 10 or so old posts and crosschecking my DreamWidth backup, I count 4 different deleted accounts whose comments have been deleted. That, coupled with the same claim made by superl99 on page 132 of the latest LJ Releases post, leads me to believe that the claim that LJ has caused the comments made by deleted journals to get deleted is true.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

Barf. I'm pretty sure that's a reversal on what they said they'd do about deleted journal comments, except without a reversal announcement.

[cacahuate.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this; I wouldn’t even have remembered that script existed.

So is the preview option just gone for good?

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

I had the same problem, but my like disabler is still enabled (one script, and also Adblock entries). All I had to do was disable the DisConnect script, which is fine because they apparently removed the Facebook and Twitter crossposting boxes for comments.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

It was Disconnect that was the problem.

[seasontoseason.livejournal.com]

I had the same problem,and for me it was also fixed by Disconnect. I just hope they don't have some new secret way of trying to force me to post shit on fb/twitter from lj...

(anyway, thanks! it's your comment that helped me solve my problem... I just google searched and this post came up. cheers)

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

I made a couple related posts in my own journal to get around the new default style, hope they help:

http://lafinjack.livejournal.com/320483.html
http://lafinjack.livejournal.com/320903.html