Gated Communities

[dxmachina]

I have no current plans to move to Dreamwidth. I bought a permanent account here a few years ago, so there's really no incentive to leave. I don't get ads, and the assorted fannish dramas with LJ over the years have little impact on mostly non-fannish self. Besides, the name and logo just seem incredibly precious.

Today I started seeing posts popping up on my friends list that were crossposted Dreamwidth posts, each with a little note on the bottom saying that if I want to comment please do it over at Dreamwidth using OpenID. The "please' turns out to be meaningless because comments are disabled on the LJ posts. So, I tried to comment on one over there. It looks like you can't do it unless you're already a member. The reply box has an option for OpenID, but it's disabled. Thought it might be a browser issue, but nope, it's the same in both IE and Firefox. Can't reply unless you're a member. Honestly, life's too short.

So I guess that's adios. I wish y'all well.

Comments

[gchick.livejournal.com]

I hope this doesn't refer to me -- if it did, first, I'm sorry; second, it's not the dreamwidth crosspost but a screwup on my own privacy settings; and third, I really wish you'd said something to me directly, and I'd've fixed it sooner.

(If it didn't, then oops! But thanks for tweaking me to go check my settings anyway.)

[dxmachina.livejournal.com]

Yours was one, but not the only one, so it looked systemic to me. Dreamwidth also showed a disclaimer when anonymous comments were disabled, but didn't show anything about OpenID.

[gchick.livejournal.com]

My apologies again: as I said, I had my security settings all wrong for crossposting, and you made me go check. (Specifically, I had disallowed anonymous comments, which I've always done -- but the OpenID implementation over there requires a validated email to consider an account registered rather than anonymous. This works okay when people are deliberately exploring DW and wanting to set up their OpenIDs, as most people who were there were doing before the cross-poster went live, but much less so when someone just follows a link to get there.)

I've also gone back to allowing comments on both LJ and DW. Gotta admit, it's something I was trying out, and didn't know the effects would be hard on people until it happened.

As for the lack of a disclaimer, I'll bring that up with the DW folks. They're good and quick and responsive to such things, and it should be an easy fix. And I'll be posting on DW so my few followers can look out for allowing comments from non-registered users.

:(