Grr

[cjsmith]

I'm getting really tired of my Friends page being seriously screwed up by badly-formatted entries people make. Today I'm guessing it's quiz results. An entry I can't see makes everything below itself almost completely unreadable.

Friends filters work, but to use them I have to find out who the problem child is. This is particularly difficult to narrow down when multiple people have the same problem; searching the solution space becomes slow! The slowness is aggravated by LJ's "optimization" on Friends page loading, such that I have to hit "reload" to get actual results from each experiment. (I wasted a lot of time getting nonsensical and conflicting results before I learned this.)

Today two or three iterations with existing friends groups showed me a subgroup of ten people I could remove just to get a viewable page. I re-added them one by one, a process taking about fifteen minutes with all the clicking around and reloading, and came up with two people filtered out.

*sigh* And I wonder why LJ takes up so much of my time.

Comments

[joedecker.livejournal.com]

I know the feeling. A related gripe is with HTML--there's no particuarly good way to "contain" the damage entries can do to the
"infrastructure HTML" -- HTML just doesn't have that kind of structure.
Even worse, entries that work with some LJ styles will break others (again, blame HTML) so even well-intentioned entries, when the user has checked that their version of the page looks right, can fall victim to this.

Ick. I don't have a great solution, but I've done precisely what you just described.

One thought:
The 'narrowing the problem' might be faster, in teh case where there are multiple problems, by temporarily decreasing the number of posts per page you allow on your friends page (it's configurable.) Just a thought.

*hugs*

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

Let me know if my entries ever seem to be a problem, please.

Sometimes folks will post something with *many* exclamation points or asterices, and that'll usually screw things up width-wise.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I've seen that too, from time to time, though it's not what hit me today. At least that one is easy to filter because I can SEE what did it! 8-D

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

I find myself wondering if there couldn't be some sort of warning system set up for the posting software, like "you have unclosed HTML tags in here. Do you wantto look like a dork?".

It'd save me from having to re-check entries with a lot of tags in them when I write them.

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

Point in case. Argh.

[joedecker.livejournal.com]

Yep, you could certainly require really clean HTML (to avoid a warning), that would help. Require some work, but people have done it before, like the various HTML validation sites.

Re:

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

There's a lot of thinkgs livejournal could do. I'm not sure they can afford the development costs, though. Before a validaor, though, I'd like a text search function for my journal. Or to be able to download it as a whole file, or set of files.

[joedecker.livejournal.com]

Oh, me too. I was just sayin' that what you proposed could be done.

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

Folding would be nice too. A 'fold all' tag that lj-cuts everything and regenerates the page, and a fold/unfold button next to each post. Prolly Expensive, but if we're playing fantasy-lj...

[joedecker.livejournal.com]

If you were willing to stick to a recent IE version or something, maybe that or Mozillia (and friends), and you were willilng to assume correct HTML, you might be able to get that visual effect... Still...

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

I was thinking more of a serverside option. Basically, the LJ pages you see are dynamically generated anyway, and bad HTML inside an LJ-cut entry doesn't affect the main page, so it would solve that particular problem neatly.

Besides, it'd be wonderful to have it fold per-user, frinstance, for all those people who ought to cut and don't, or per community, so that you could scan community posts by first line and expand only the ones you wanted to.

[joedecker.livejournal.com]

Sure--but it'll be peppier if you could do it client-side. Hmmm.
The 'deals with bad HTML' is a nice thing, fer sure.

Hmmm, there might be some tricks one could play with rewriting
the page using document.write(), and only writing the 'open' bits
and the infrastructure code but not the closed stuff. I think you
have to have JS code which writes itself to do this, which might
make it more challenging, but there might be a cute hack short
of self-expressing programming.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Ooo, text search, yayuh! That'd be worth doing the development myself, although I can't right now spare the time for the learning curve.