Magus's Grimoire [Abridged]

It seems many people haven't really thought through the implications of this new feature, and some people might not be aware of it. So.

LJ has introduced a feature where, if you link your LJ account to your Twitter or Facebook account, you can publish all your entries and/or comments to that remote site. It will include the title, the first bunch of words, and a link to the entry or comment.

The settings don't completely suck; even if you turn on crossposting by default, it will be turned off by default for comments to locked entries. But it's not hard to turn on (just a checkbox), even by accident (a checkbox interjected in the tab order that's muscle memory for some people). I think the greater risk here is going to be people who don't have crossposting comments on by default, but do choose to crosspost comments semi-frequently; for them, crossposting their comment to a locked entry won't feel any different than crossposting to an open entry. As much as I hate them, an "are you sure" popup might have been appropriate here, just for locked posts.

So, here's the thing. If you quote when you comment, and you crosspost, then you're crossposting whatever you quoted. Even if you don't, your comment is likely to be indicative of what was being discussed and possibly some of the content, and it will include a link which indicates the presence of a locked entry on that topic.

No real privacy on the Internet, information wants to be free, blah, blah, blah. I know none of you wants to be the jerk who reveals something someone preferred to keep to a select group [locked post] to a broader audience, so tread very carefully with this new feature. If you even turn it on.

I attempted to post a reply to a recent post over at ontd_science. Oddly, it asked me to log in. As LiveJournal has been occasionally dropping my login credentials for no apparent reason recently, I thought nothing of it, and so I missed the "Logged in user: marcmagus - Sorry, you are not a member of ontd_science, and commenting is restricted to members only."

That's mildly irritating, but fine, it's my own fault. The problem is with the error message I received when I attempted to post:

You did not enter your LiveJournal username. You can choose to post as "Anonymous" if you don't have a LiveJournal user account.

Only members of ontd_science can post in this community.

The first line is the real problem. I entered my username and password in the little boxes. Correctly. Three times, thinking there was some weird interaction going on between LiveJournal and NoScript or something. The second line didn't register because it came second, and because I'd forgotten that I just follow the community and never joined it.

If the error message at the top of the page when I tried to post had been the same as the more helpful one buried next to the radio buttons, I would have shaken my head at not noticing the problem before typing in my credentials and moved on. Instead, I got this weird confusing crap that made me think there was a technical problem.

I hope DreamWidth has fixed this one in their fork. I haven't tried to post to a community I don't have posting privileges to there.

This signal needs boosting even if LiveJournal has actually speedily responded and repaired the problem. This is why we test before we ship, people. Especially with stuff that has potential financial impact. Seriously.

In brief, yesterday LJ shipped a code change which used some really sneaky JavaScript to munge outbound links when you click on them. Yes, as I'm reading this, that means that for most users the address they saw when hovering over the link was different than the link they were actually directed to upon clicking.

Specifically, the code would cause outbound links to a whole bunch of e-commerce sites to have the LJ affiliate link silently added. In fact, it would even replace an existing affiliate link with LJ's. Seriously, that's the behavior people are reporting.

It apparently only made these changes when your page was being viewed by someone who wasn't logged in. That's not really any comfort.

I haven't actually gone through the code to confirm it did what people are saying, but what I'm reading is certainly plausible.

More at the following:

• http://vichan.livejournal.com/392527.html
• http://shatterstripes.livejournal.com/1065670.html?format=light
• http://shatterstripes.livejournal.com/1065749.html?format=light
• http://shatterstripes.livejournal.com/1066190.html?format=light

The problems with this are so numerous I don't even know where to begin:

• This is a major change [even if it seems minor] that never should have been released without thorough testing.
• Stealing money from users.
• Creating misleading links like that is not ok for any reason, and could well break functionality on some browsers.
• ...

Update: LiveJournal has rolled back the relevant changes and sent letters indicating these changes would never have been allowed to go live.

If you haven't heard yet, synecdochic has pointed out that LiveJournal is changing their codebase to make the gender field mandatory at account creation. http://synecdochic.dreamwidth.org/366609.html

I've been asked if the code really does what's being reported, and I'm starting to see a fair amount of speculation about what it does and what it will do, so I'm going to go over the changelog entries which seem relevant myself and report back on what I find.

( Details behind the cut )

TLDR: I'm not 100% certain, but my code browse suggests this forces only new users to select a gender. I'd anticipate an upcoming change to force existing users to select a gender at next profile edit, if this doesn't do it. I believe you will still be able to change your gender in your profile, unless they decide to add some extra Fail.

Edit: If it's not immediately apparent to you why this is a bad thing, well, I don't have the energy to explain it right now. rm does an excellent job at http://rm.livejournal.com/1770434.html.

LJ's comment notification is broken and seems to be getting worse, not better, as time passes. If they don't fix it soon, I may turn off comments at LJ and direct everybody to Dreamwidth [something I've been considering anyway to consolidate discussion].

If I did so, I hope the comment count and direct link to mode=reply would suffice to not be too much of a pain for people to comment.

The LJ New Comments script for Greasemonkey is really cool. It keeps track of which comments you've already read, and gives handy keyboard shortcuts to jump to the [n]ext/[p]revious new comment.

It works with Dreamwidth, too.

( Opera )