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

[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!"