Making LiveJournal useable

[karen2205]

LiveJournal has been becoming increasing unuseable, possibly since I started using it in 2003. I keep having to find workarounds for 'features' and other things I don't want.

Things I'm currently doing:

*have paid account to avoid advertising [yes, I do realise there are other ways of doing this]
*have custom style to remove user pics from my friends' page
*use of image placeholders
*lots of Greasemonkey scripts to get rid of the annoying CProd boxes, unthread threaded comments, get rid of that awful navigation strip, getting rid of other people's forced fonts etc.
*AdBlock Plus to get rid of snapshot previews
*Privacy settings to disable receipt of virtual gifts, the nudge feature, the collecting anonymous statistics through the hitbox replacement thing, the new private messaging thing.

What things have you done to make LiveJournal useable for you?

Comments

[mstevens.livejournal.com]

I don't mind LJ too much. I have a paid account, although it's more for the extra paid account features like polls.

I haven't noticed these snapshot previews, I like user pics, nobody sends me gifts or nudges me, and I haven't had a private message yet, but I don't think I'd mind.

[mirrorshard.livejournal.com]

Mostly, get irritated a lot.

I let my paid account lapse, but I'm considering going back to it now because the extra features are getting more and more appealing. (Or, conversely, the continuing addition of things free users can't do is getting more annoying.)

[mirrorshard.livejournal.com]

Oh, by the way - you can (and for my money should) turn off the snapshot previews here. I just wish there was an option never to see anyone else's.

Getting rid of snapshot previews for everyone

[pplfichi.livejournal.com]

As long as you are happy to accept the cookie...

[toothycat]

AdBlock Plus to get rid of snapshot previews

Blimey, I should have thought of that. Simple and effecive. Thanks! Wow, I can read other people's LJs now without having fits of rage...

[kamara.livejournal.com]

As long as LJ never axe Dystopia site scheme it will be perfect for me.

So yeah, right now nothing on LJ bugs me. But then I rarely leave my f-page.

[jvvw.livejournal.com]

I really haven't noticed much difference. I've almost got round to sorting out AdBlock Pus for the snapshot previews, but maybe I just use LJ in a very simplistic way.

[rougeforever.livejournal.com]

Nothing, LJ is perfectly usable for me in its raw form :)

[lovingboth]

* Yes, bought a permanent account some years ago.

* I don't mind these - in some cases, they're a very useful reminder what people look like :) - but I can see some aren't terribly worksafe.

* Large images off

* I don't mind the strip and not many people force fonts on my flist.

* Snapshot previews? Perhaps I'm blocking them inadvertently.

* Haven't bothered with these.

The main thing I do to make browsing better is turn off Flash. 99% of the time it's an ad or embedded content I don't want to see.

[entirelysonja.livejournal.com]

I do find the preview thing a bit annoying, but not so much so as to do anything about it. I just try to keep my mouse away from the window. :-)

I bought a permanent account several years ago, so I've never been bothered by ads. I probably would find that irritating.

Other than that, I haven't been annoyed by any new features.

[pne.livejournal.com]

I'm just waiting till private messages start to get used for spam.

[ludy]

i don't really mind anything apartform the ads (and i'm currently enjoying a few motnhs of paid acount so they aren't a probelm for now) though the navigatio strip is a bit anoying. I wouldn't be able to cope with the Horizon site scheme though because i'm sometimes to dyspraxic for mouseovers

[a-musing-amazon.livejournal.com]

I've done absolutely nothing. Don't even have a paid account. What are these Ads people are talking about? (but then I don't get email spam either).

[nameandnature]

I have a paid account for the infinite pins of stalking, not for removing ads: as you say, Adblock can do that.

You can remove userpics completely by Adblocking the userpic.livejournal.com server. I do this at work.

Don't care about dodgy images, as I only check my friends page from work and my friends don't post dodgy images outside a cut.

Threaded comments are a good thing, not a bad thing, and one significant way that LJ wins over other blogging software. I think LJ should be Usenet but prettier, more or less.

Adblock snapshot: yep, obviously. Has the bonus side-effect of getting rid of the wretched thing from other sites, too.

Don't care about getting vgifts, nudged or private messaged. I'm struggling to see a significant downside to these things. With the possible exception of private messages, they're useless to me but not actively evil.

What I've done on top of what's mentioned above is install the following userscripts: LJ thread unfolder (which doesn't flatten threads, but allows you to see the remainder of a thread when LJ stops showing comment bodies), Anonymous posting warning (for when I forget to log in), LJ New Comments (as it's my baby and useful for big discussion threads) and Quick Track (lets you use pins of stalking with a single click rather than getting the page asking you how you want the notifications: I always want them in the Message Centre). I'm working on something to make RSS feeds of the comments on my public posts, but LJ's recent comment editing upgrade broke their own comment download protocol in such a way that it might now be unfriendly to LJ's servers to keep up to date with edited comments. Hoping they fix that.