Mild LJ feature annoyance.

[aruru]

Okay, so it's pretty stupid to bitch about something as ultimately trivial as this (especially since it's not being posted somewhere where it would MATTER), and I'm probably ignorant about the whole situation since I don't bother to read any of the LJ-related communities other than lj_maintenance, but I still feel the need to rant about it here:

Look, LJ-development folks - I really appreciate what you guys usually do. You work hard, and it shows. And I think that this little thingie that I just noticed you've added to people's info pages so you can quickly modify your interest lists to add/remove stuff to be a cute feature - a mostly useless feature, as I didn't really mind going through the few extra steps, but cute.

BUT WHY THE FUCK DO YOU GUYS FEEL THE NEED TO ADD THAT, THEN TAKE AWAY AN ACTUALLY USEFUL FEATURE LIKE GETTING COMMUNITY LISTINGS WHEN SEARCHING BY INTEREST?

Seriously, WHY? I actually FOUND several communities I thought interesting in that manner. And how the HELL do you guys expect people to find out about new communities like my poor and highly neglected fledgling sabbu unless I do some REALLY heavy whoring out promotion from the start (even before I think it's truly ready to handle that), huh?! And you know, on a boring day, it was pretty darn funny to see just how many comms (as well as people) shared the more "eccentric" interests listed on tws_support (which btw, found a fair number of its original wave of new members BECAUSE of the interests list).

Now, really, what's the POINT of a community listing ANY interests at all anymore if you can't find it when you search by those same interests they list? And honestly, if you guys did this because there are communities out there that don't want to be easily found for whatever reason, they can just take the simple route of NOT LISTING ANY INTERESTS TO BEGIN WITH.

Christ on a cracker, and all I was trying to do was find a community that distributed free LJ codes like the "codes" community on JournalFen does (I know they exist, I just don't know the names of the places offhand.) so I could answer a random stranger's question. Now I'm going to have to pick through individual users' community membership lists and hope I can locate one that way.

I sincerely hope that the people in charge of developing LJ's features don't intend to leave this crap as it is. Sheesh.

Comments

[miome.livejournal.com]

Keep an eye on this post for an answer.

[aruru.livejournal.com]

Thanks, yo. I can never keep any of those communities (other than maintenance, which I only really check when LJ's being a bit wonky so I can find out if it's something that's actually happening on their end of things or not) straight in my mind, so I wouldn't have known which one was best to search for details in. ^^;;

So anyway, from the sounds of this post, it seems that the people on the business end of things suddenly decided that it would be a Good Idea to take away this feature from us lowly leeches free users and turn it into an incentive to get a paid account, and didn't even bother to discuss the thing first with anyone else, including the freakin' developers of these features themselves. *snort* Cute, really cute. Already willing to bet this is going to cause drama of proportions as epic as those of the whole "posting limit" debacle a few months back, if things keep up as they are.

*SIGH* At least I lucked out and the first individual user in the search I did had some code-sharing communities listed in his/her "member of" section. But still, I think that was far more hassle than was necessary - imagine if I had to use a less narrow search than the one I came up with. Oy.

[miome.livejournal.com]

lj_dev wouldn't normally be a place you'd look for changes and errors, this seems to be an exception (because it's already been asked elsewhere, with no reply?).

[aruru.livejournal.com]

Oh wow, so it seems the reasoning behind this change is a complete and utter mystery to everyone who isn't bradfitz, then, and that lj_dev poster you linked is just as lost as the rest of us, and simply meant what he said as a theory on what might be the deal regarding the disabling of the feature.

...somehow, I get the feeling that this is even worse than what my original impression of the issue was.

(Geez, no wonder Brad got so soundly bitched out by everyone and their grandmother back when he wanted to pull that crazy post limit thing last time.)

[aruru.livejournal.com]

Wait, wait... the man just answered (http://www.livejournal.com/community/lj_dev/553289.html?thread=5029193#t5029193). The explanation completely flies over my head as I'm not a techie of any kind, but he answered.

And now that he answered, I have to say: Geez, couldn't he have said this from the very beginning when he took it down? I mean, with the amount of users LJ has, people were BOUND to notice it was missing!

[miome.livejournal.com]

Have I told you that explaining technical things is one of my favorite activities? Consider yourself warned.

So, LJ is based on a huge database. Inside the database are tables, which look kind of like this:

Username	Password	Account Type	...
aruru	hpfanssux0r	Free	...
miome	nekkidsnape	Wanker	...
tsaiko	drowssap	Paid	...

(Each line is called a record, btw, and a query is a search on a table. Because database dorks can't call anything by it's proper name. :( )

Right now, there's a table called 'userinterests' which has (not suprisingly) each user and their list of interests. However, there is no such table for communities ... instead, the program has to go to one of the huge tables that holds lots of data. Because so many things use the big tables, they tend to be slow. Thus the need for a 'comminterests' table, which would be smaller and not hit by so many things, and thus faster & more available.

Does that make a little more sense?

[aruru.livejournal.com]

*LMAO* Yes, that certainly explains things a whole lot better than whatever the hell Brad said there.

(I also like how my password is "hpfanssux0r," even though I only ever so much as lightly poke at them, and my most "evil" remark to date has probably been the "Snape = fantabulous drag queen?" thing. >D Oh, and I love your "nekkidsnape" pass and "Wanker" account type. *still in a fit of giggles because of that* XD XD XD)


Anyway, translating your explanation down to Simpleton (in other words, my language), Brad's answer basically is: "I took it down so I could streamline things, make it faster and more efficient."

Okay, that's perfectly fine. In fact, that's great. I applaud the move.

But could you leave SOME note of why you did something like that with what seems to be a well-used feature next time? I mean, you even had people WHO WORK FOR YOU putting on the tinfoil hats and speculating that it was going to be turned into a paid-only feature. If you can't see how this leads to some serious misunderstandings and highly unnecessary drama, then... dude, you got issues. *shakes head*

RRRRAAAARRRRRGH!

[potega.livejournal.com]

It doesn't work for us paid users either. I. Am. PISSED.

Re: RRRRAAAARRRRRGH!

[aruru.livejournal.com]

It doesn't?

This just gets weirder and weirder...

Wait, wait...

[aruru.livejournal.com]

As I said in my reply to Miome above, Brad just came in to answer the question (http://www.livejournal.com/community/lj_dev/553289.html?thread=5029193#t5029193).

And as I said before: Why couldn't he had left THAT small explanation (which I don't really follow, but seems to basically imply that the answer is "I took it away because wanted to fix it up") from the start? Geez.

Re: Wait, wait...

[eldena.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I asked one of my friends who's on support about this yesterday, and she hadn't heard of it but knew they'd done something to interest searching recently. All indications are that this is a temporary state; Brad is just lousy at PR (when they were putting in posting limits there were issues because he'd intended to do that without talking to the rest of the staff about it). If it were an intended feature, I'd like to think that he'd at least say something about it then.

Re: Wait, wait...

[aruru.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, I remember that infamous drama about the posting limits (Now THAT was epic, yo.). He's REALLY lousy about keeping even the people who freakin' help him with this place properly informed about things, isn't he? Just... wow.

At least there seems to be a good amount of people willing to give him a thwack on the head or two to get him to pay attention. Oh well.

In the meantime, guys...

[kuchenhexe.livejournal.com]

This is a beautiful resource: communitysearch.

Re: In the meantime, guys...

[aruru.livejournal.com]

Cool. That thing looks vaguely familiar (guess I might've run into it before).

I know that the main community page lists community_promo (no explanation necessary) and community_quest (sounds like a personals site for comms), but they might want to think about listing this one on there, too.