PSA: Livejournal commenting

[matgb]

Just a heads up, in the last 24 hours I've received over 100 spam comments on the Livejournal mirror, so I've turned comments there to "friends only" instead of the former "anyone". Comments here on DW will remain open to all, as DW has better comment management facilities and invite codes means spammers have to work to get past the 'need an account' barrier.

It's a very small number of old posts targetted, normally I'd just turn comments off for those posts only, but Livejournal has such a weird system that you can't just turn new comments off, you have to remove all existing comments, something DW either has or will soon be fixing.

On a similar topic to where I prefer comments to go, those of you that've had problems commenting on Dreamwidth due to the NoScript extension going haywire (like theweaselking) might be interested in foxfirefey's explanation of the problem; basically, NoScript has a built in exception for Livejournal that they haven't yet extended to DW, if the exception wasn't there, the exact same warnings would flash up on LJ commenting, it's something to do with XSS and cross-site/subdomain cookies. You can override it yourself, or wait until they update to fix it.

Comments

[caramel-betty.livejournal.com]

It's a very small number of old posts targetted, normally I'd just turn comments off for those posts only, but Livejournal has such a weird system that you can't just turn new comments off, you have to remove all existing comments, something DW either has or will soon be fixing.

On LJ, if I set "Allow Comments?" to Disabled, it hides all the existing comments - and prevents new ones.

If I, instead, set it to Locked, all the existing comments are visible but marked "Replies frozen" (just as if I'd frozen the thread/comment manually) - and prevents new comments too.

[matgb]

Aha. OK, that's new, and I didn't notice it. It's definitely new, as DW doesn't have it, which means the above is completely wrong. I guess I must've noticed the change in an announcement, and applied it to DW in my memory.

So I'll switch it back to anyone in a few days, hopefully by then the current comment storm will calm down, it's not just me getting it.

[frith]

I don't rely on a NoScript extension, I just leave Javascript disabled, enabling it only when absolutely necessary. I can comment just fine on DW with Javascript turned off.

[matgb]

Just tried it, and yes, you can, but the quickreply box doesn't work. No idea what'd happen to OpenID logging in and similar.

But it's noscript as a specific that causes problems, not because it doesn't work but because it flags quickreply as cross site scripting, which is annoying for those using it. Personally, I like quickreply, and Gmail pretty much needs JS, as do several of the AJAX tweaks that makes DW fairly usable.

But thx for comment, I don't use either therefore won't know all the issues.

[frith]

I've been told by the DreamWidth development team that the underlying HTML functionality will remain viable regardless of the Javascript bells and whistles that get implemented. And yes, OpenID works fine with Javascript turned off, I tried it when I made a visual tutorial for a friend, posted here: http://frith.dreamwidth.org/128675.html So, I have no idea what a "quickreply box" looks like... the usual HTML based dialog box works fine for me and I doubt I could type any quicker than I'm typing now. Blogspot is a pain in the arse in that you don't get a bleeding dialog box to type in unless you enable Javascript. Wankers.

LOL! I live on a different planet, I go directly to the LJ/DW/Blogspot/EndlessForest site to browse and reply, I don't do so via email. My email is chock-a-block full of ListServ-type discussion, I'd go batty if I had to handle any more ingredients in that soup.