The Russians are Coming! The Russians are Com....Здравствуйте! Nyet, Привет!

[captainsblog]

(That should roughly translate to "oh hai!" I'm sure someone will did tell me if it doesn't.)

There's been nothing official about it just yet, but already I've seen the beginnings of it on several Friends' comment pages: LJ is rolling out major style changes, particularly in relationship to commenting, which have been throughly developed, critiqued, beta'd and announced on official LiveJournal pages....

for the Russians, by the Russians and in the Russian.

Many thanks to our Friend Darina, aka tilia_tomentosa, for this post. It, in turn, links to the LJ of manonon, a speaker of both languages who has been translating the various pieces of Cryllic coming across their newsfeed.

Lots of changes are a-footman, particularly in the commenting area. Comment thread titles are kaput, and drop-down listings of icons have also been exiled, in favor of a pick-by-image selection that takes infinitely longer even on a laptop with decent memory available. I can only imagine how they'll go on my iPhone which is already painfully slow.

It hasn't hit my particular default style yet, but audacian's, for one, is already displaying it, and I am doubleplusunhappied. It's nothing I asked for, makes commenting (both participating and reading) harder and more time-consuming, and while the lack of subject lines may annoy the comment spammers, I doubt for one second that it will slow them down, much less stop them.

Already, I've seen at least one longtime LJ Friend pound his shoe on the podium and end his speech here.  Once I come up with some alternative hosting and uploading methods- if I'm even going to continue blogging at all in the coming year- I am likely to be joining him in the Land of Far Far Away.

----

Then again, I shouldn't make any Dirty Rotten Commie remarks, because this bunch is as capitalist as SixApart ever was. Maybe more so.

Remember the dreaded multi-day DDOS outage of the Summer of '11?  (Not to be confused with any of the shorter ones they've endured since then.) Well, shortly after that, Fearless Leader consented to give us all a two-week extension of our Paid time.  Nice gesture, guys, and appreciated especially here, since my paid account expires days before Christmas and extending that payment into the New Year made a couple of extra silly seasonal purchases possible.

Except not.  Two days before the old expiry date, good ol' LJ sent an email confirming they would be deducting a slightly smaller payment on the same old December 22 date. So instead of the full shot coming due two weeks later as I had expected and budgeted, they essentially charged me for 50/52nds of an annual membership this week.  Which meant that there's a little less petrol in the tank right now and a bit less room for error in the coming two weeks.

I'd complain, but apparently I don't speak the language anymore, and besides I seriously doubt they'll be around in any recognizable form (or if they are, likely I'll not) by the time that next expiry date comes up.

Comments

[tilia-tomentosa.livejournal.com]

LOL

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

Figures. I got the cuss word right the first time, a few months back.

[tilia-tomentosa.livejournal.com]

This is just the beginning, Ray. They are planning to redesign the entire site, every single bit of it. There are already samples of the new pages that are being beta tested (there are links to them in manonon's journal), but they are only in Russian.

igrick's arguments for killing the subject line can be summed up as "I don't like it, only 1% of the users use it (he refused to reveal the source of his statistics), and they'll forget about it with time." The change has already managed to mess up I don't know how many LJ communities that rely heavily on the subject line. Yet he insists that the subject line isn't coming back, because he says so. Or maybe it's coming back as a feature for paid users only, but nobody says it directly.

And oh, the preview feature is gone now from the new comment form, (it's not clear if it was a mistake or a conscious decision) but they have allowed all users to edit their comments as a compensation. Which has made some paid users even angrier.

For the record, igrick is just as arrogant with Russian users who complain.

[bill_sheehan.livejournal.com]

I'm up in March. I'm going to have to make a decision before then.