It's not a bug, it's a feature

[pne]

You know how when you've skipped back 75 entries on a journal, you get taken to day mode?

People used to think that this was due to database strain or similar constraints, but apparently this was a conscious decision.

Whodathunkit.

Comments

[angelsk.livejournal.com]

Urgh, I hate this feature.

[pne.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I find it annoying, too.

As jamesd pointed out (http://www.livejournal.com/users/brad/2127725.html?thread=10503277#t10503277), "the switch to day at a time mode usually also means switching from worth reading to too much hassle to be worthwhile, usually."

Since you usually only see a small amount of information at once, which makes it hard to find something. And for someone who doesn't post frequently, using that view to find the immediately previous entry can be frustrating. Heck, even go.bml?dir=prev only works if the previous entry was within the previous 30 days (IIRC).

'twould be nice if it would skip back further than that; preferably indefinitely. Especially if, with the new database design, this may not even incur significant speed penalties.

[karen2205]

It does kind of make sense though, when you look at it that way, at least IMO.

[pne.livejournal.com]

Well -- yeah.

But that doesn't mean that I can't find it annoying that when I don't want to cache or link to a specific page, but just want to see "a bunch of past entries together at once" (e.g. to find something), I can't.

[conuly]

Well, that's annoying.

[marikochan.livejournal.com]

The limit on skip in one's own LJ doesn't annoy me so much; after a two-week trip I found myself quite irritated that I can only go back a certain number of days in the friends list -- because as far as I know there's no way to do that day-by-day!

[pne.livejournal.com]

True -- friends pages only show you the last two weeks of entries (or the last 1000, whichever limit is reached first), and you can't go back further than that at all. (Well, unless you visit each friend's journal in turn.)

[asciident]

Maybe Brad doesn't remember, but that's what he and everyone else told people: it was too much on the servers. These days not so much, but it's still pretty damn ugly.

[leora.livejournal.com]

That's Brad for you...

[pne.livejournal.com]

What, the "I don't care how people use the site, this is how I think they should use it"?

[leora.livejournal.com]

That's not how I'd have phrased it, but yes.

[pne.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I realised afterwards that it was a bit more incendiary(?) than I had intended.

But I had seen similar attititudes here and there e.g. in Zilla items.

[leora.livejournal.com]

The modification of how backdate is used to make it the most confusing feature on LiveJournal by combining two unrelated purposes...

[pne.livejournal.com]

Which two are you thinking of? The "hide from friends list" and "post in the past"?

Or "post in the past" and "post in the future without affecting the ability to post in the present"?

[leora.livejournal.com]

In the past... backdating was used to keep entries off of friends lists. This was an odd name for the feature and it confused people. But Support cleared up problems and we managed along...

Every so often there would come along a user who had been backdating entries for a while and wrote in to say - nothing I post shows up! Then we'd find a bunch of old posts somewhere in the past... often years old. I found it fun - find the lost posts. And it was a fairly routine thing. One of the fairly easy troubleshooting things for new volunteers to cut their teeth on. A step up from how do I make a memory or delete an entry, but not too tough.

But Brad got tired of all of these lost entries. And he got tired of people sometimes having to fix dozens of misdated entries because their computer clock was off. So, with no warning, he made it so that you cannot post an entry earlier than your latest entry without using backdating unless the aforesaid later entry itself is backdated.

This was put through with no consultation ... no questions about what problems it would raise. It was put through as something that would reduce support requests... but with no one asking Support what they thought. It fixed that problem, but created many of the current problems Support has with backdating, including that it is difficult to get even Support volunteers to understand exactly how backdating works - much less an average user. I've tried explaining it to geeks, and it takes a few tries, because it really is quite confusing. And none of it links in any clear way to the term "backdating". So, I really think it just made things more complicated. It was a nice attempt to fix a problem... but ...

[conuly]

And nobody seems to understand the error message. They inevitably skip over the part about when their most recent entry is dated and say "but my computer's clock *is* right!"

[ladyortyger.livejournal.com]

It bugs me a LOT.

But for searching my own journal I use an offsite program, LJArchive to find the date, then plug it into the browser..