InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "It's all about teh love."

RatCreature (ratcreature) wrote,
@ 2008-05-07 08:40:00

Entry tags:

fanfic, fanfic: rants, meta, rants, whining

another random pet peeve post...
When people link to their journal posts containing stories or art, some link not the "plain" entry, but to the "reply mode" version, i.e. you get an URL with "?mode=reply" at the end, a comment form below, and don't see any previous comments. Also, and that is the main reason why I hate the practice, the title of the browser window will be "Post Comment" rather than the subject line of the entry, which commonly is the LJ name plus the title of the work. I get the idea behind linking to the reply form-- people think it encourages comments to have the comment field right there, but the downside is, one, that if you open links in tabs (like when you click several potentially interesting links on your f-list while scrolling down) you can't see in your tab what you have open to easily click the tab to pick it to read, and two, even more annoying for me, if you bookmark the page you won't get the subject line as link text but will have to edit that link text line manually, and edit the URL manually to get the plain one, though that is quicker as you just have to delete a bit.

I bookmark almost every story I finish reading and tag them. Normally I can highlight the summary, click the bookmark button and get the right link text (provided the author didn't put "yay! fic" or something random in their fanfic subject line, which is another annoyance) plus the highlighted summary as description, and just add the tags, whereas with the reply mode link, I highlight the summary, click the bookmark button, then get the wrong link text, have to edit the URL to get a plain bookmark, click back to the window itself to copy the subject line, click back to the tagging dialog, delete the "Post Comment" link text and paste in the right subject. So it is two clicks, two deletions and one c&p action more effort, which, unless the story or art was very nice, puts me in a frame of mind to skip the commenting this was meant to encourage.

Is anyone else annoyed every time they land on a reply page when clicking a link rather than the journal entry proper?

(Post a new comment)

	caia_comica 2008-05-07 02:01 pm UTC (link)
	I share your annoyance, although I stand in awe of your fic organization skills! (Reply to this) (Thread)

ratcreature
2008-05-07 02:40 pm UTC (link)

Once I made it a habit to automatically tag right after reading it wasn't that much effort anymore, and it really makes things easier to find again, also for the rec pages and thematic lists I maintain, so that I can store links there until I update my site, and can just recall the tag I need to see what I've read that fits since the last update. But having to c&p and click more than necessary for this still sucks, and I'm not more likely to comment just because the field is open either.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

	cmshaw 2008-05-07 06:55 pm UTC (link)
	one reason i've seen for doing it is to keep the page smaller -- if there are a lot of comments, that's a lot of extra load time, plus it's harder to judge the length of fic by how far down the page you've scrolled. (i don't generally do that when i link, but that's mostly because i'm lazy....) (Reply to this) (Thread)

	ratcreature 2008-05-07 07:04 pm UTC (link)
	Yeah, I can see these points, and actually here on IJ it doesn't make as difference for the convenience of bookmarking, because for some unfathomable reason here subject lines don't appear in the browser window title. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	lastscorpion 2008-05-07 10:45 pm UTC (link)
	I find it annoying, too, but I admit I've sometimes done it myself. When I first started doing lj-type things, I didn't know how to figure out the url for a post with the comments showing if there weren't any comments on it yet, but the "reply to" version is always easily clickable. (Reply to this) (Thread)

	ratcreature 2008-05-08 03:58 am UTC (link)
	I admit I'm baffled by this, because even if you initially c&p the reply to page URL, don't you see the URL after that in your link post and could just delete the stuff after the .html? I hadn't realized that the URL scheme could be not transparent to anyone at all familiar with the concept of URLs. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	lastscorpion 2008-05-08 07:34 pm UTC (link)
	Well, yeah, that's how I do it now, but it took me a while to figure it out, years ago when I first started looking at lj. Call me dumb, if you like. :-) (Reply to this) (Parent)