murdering | LJ to DW: A post full of rainbows and sky ponies, or A Detailed FAQ (Reply)

Last updated: January 6, 7:30 PM Mountain Time

This is UNDER CONSTRUCTION. If you see something that you want added to this FAQ, leave a comment and I will do my absolute best to address it ASAP.

IMPORTANT: LIVEJOURNAL IS OFFERING COURTESY REFUNDS TO USERS WHO HAVE PURCHASED PAID TIME WITHIN THE LAST MONTH. This plurk covers what is going on, why, and how to go about requesting your refund.

For a live feed of games moving and various DW-related news, check out this unaffiliated Plurk account:

dwupdates.

COMMUNITIES

I want to bring my community over here!
Community imports are now open to all communities, regardless of comment number.

Can I crosspost new entries from a community on DW to my community on LJ?
Nope. No word on a future for this, either. Sorry!

COMMUNITY

But what about all the friends I had on LJ? I'm all alone here! I don't know where to find people who share my love of series X and the literary analysis of manga!

Everyone has to go to a new school someday, and there are a lot of ways for you to get some fresh faces into your online posse.

Masterlist of Masterlists of DW Communities - For all your comm-shopping needs

Community Rec -o-Matic - Tell these nice people your interests/what types of comms you are looking for, and they will give you recommendations on communities they think you would enjoy.

COST

Why is DW $6 for 2 months while LJ is $5?
For that extra dollar, DW gives you 70 more userpics than you get with a paid account on Livejournal.
Here's a comparison for the pricing, using one-time payments. All prices are for 100 icons, as DW's paids automatically come with 100 icons, and the value of the LJ account isn't comparable unless you calculate the 100 icons in for Livejournal alongside Dreamwidth.

	LJ	DW
2 months	$7.00 USD	$6.00 USD
6 months	$21.00 USD	$17.50 USD
12 months	$35.00 USD	$35.00 USD

But I still want extra icon packages!
Userpics are a huge load on a site's servers, which is why packages haven't been introduced. However,

denise has stated that additional userpic options are a possibility being worked on, once community imports have been figured out.

Why can't I pay using PayPal?
Dreamwidth tried to start using PayPal, but PayPal demanded that DW censor the content in some journals on their site. DW refused, and therefore they do not have a relationship with PayPal. A more in-depth post about the PayPal issue can be found over here, written by

denise.

But if I can't use PayPal, how can I buy paid time/tokens?
Dreamwidth accepts credit cards for online payments, and checks/money orders for payments within the US. More details about their paid time options are found here, in the FAQ.

JOURNALS

I've heard I can import my entire journal over here. How do I do that?
Go to 'Organize' => 'Import Content'. Enter the journal name and password. Hit submit, then select the items you want imported. Once you submit it, you can leave the site/window and go do whatever you want. It's been added to the queue, so it'll process on its own when the imports submitted before it have finished.

A video on how to do this is below.

Can I use my layout from Livejournal over here?
Why, yes, for certain layout styles!

starlit has a tutorial over here on how to bring over Smooth Sailing, Flexible Squares, Mixit, and Nebula for your journal-prettifying needs.

How do I turn off custom comment pages?
Go to Organize => Manage Account.
Under the "Display" tab (second from the left), uncheck the ticky box beside "Show my journal's entry pages in my chosen style instead of the site layout".
Hit "save".

How can I make styles on DW?
Over in

style_system, they actually ran a style-making class to show users how to make more styles for the site in an easy-to-understand way. Check it out if you're interested in designing some more journal styles for other users to use!

THE SITE

This site is ugly.
If you have Chrome or Firefox, there is a way to fix that- In fact, you can make it look just like Livejournal's traditional color scheme.

I'm worried that all of these people and games moving over here will send the site down in flames.
Well, here's the good news: 22,000+ journals have been created in the last few days, and the owners purchased a new server to help handle the additional traffic. Despite the increase in traffic, though, there hasn't been any downtime, and site loading times are still pretty darn fast.

markposted about the site's status with this new load of users and activity here.

Where can I see what the people in charge of this place are doing?
The admins keep us very well-informed on their activities through several venues: Twitter (

dreamwidth), the maintenance community (

dw_maintenance), and monthly-ish updates on the news community (

dw_news).

I want to know more about the business aspect of DW.
Then you're in luck, because they have a community for that over at

dw_biz.

Can I still use the same html tags I used on Livejournal?
DW has those tags and more- you just have to type something a little different into those carats to make them work. A table for these tags is below. (If the background of the cell is purple, it works on DW as it works on LJ.)

LJ	DW
<lj-cut>	<cut>
<lj-cut text="">	<cut text="">
<lj user="">	<user name="">

Now for some bonuses: On DW, you can use the username tag to hit up other sites. The current list includes LJ, Twitter, Plurk, Ravelry (because knitters are BAMFs), DeviantArt, Wordpress, Blogspot, Delicio.us, and Last.Fm, and many more. All you have to do is the following code:

<user name="" site="">

For example, my Twitter name is Fleurily. So I'll link it thusly:

<user name="fleurily" site="twitter.com">

Which will then show up like this:

fleurily

More information about the markups recently added over here, under Enhancements.

I have a suggestion I would like to make to the people in charge of this site!
Then run on over to

dw_suggestions and read up on how to get your suggestions submitted! Strangely enough, they actually listen to their userbase here- After all, that's how we ended up with nice custom off-site user name functions.

Backgrounds won't work on my profile layout.
And they won't until they fix the overall site scheme to support them. Sorry.

How can I change my font size? The tag won't work for me.
This is caused by the same issue with table backgrounds. You need to use the or <div style="">tag. Example below:

TEXT GOES HERE

 ONLY works on comments, NOT in profiles.

spinal covers this in more detail over here.

I want more help. Where can I find tutorials on things for this site?

stepps made a nice list of things like this for you over here.

I want to make my own journal layouts.
Well, you're in luck: I went through and put the base CSS for every layout on DW right now into .txt files, which you can find over here.

LIVEJOURNAL

What's so bad about the new layout?
So far, people have reported having issues that range from being completely unable to load the new LJ on their computers to developing headaches, nausea, and eye fatigue from prolonged use of the site. While some people are not having these issues, that does not invalidate or disprove the experiences that other users are having. Some people have light and color sensitivity issues, and some don't. People who want to access LJ to roleplay are not going to "make up" issues that prevent them from using the site to do what they want to do.

Why don't people want to come to DW?
I obviously cannot speak for everyone, but here are some of the reasons that I have seen floating around, as well as elaboration and rebuttals/information about the reasons that I can provide those things for.

Icons: DW only has 15 for free accounts.

So does Livejournal. There's a glitch people have exploited to get 30 icons for free after being on a 2-week free trial, but in all honesty, it's not reasonable to expect this to be a permanent thing. Paid time on LJ gets you 30 icons. Paid time on DW, for $1.00 more at the two-month level, gets you 100 icons. tl;dr, DW gives you more icons for less money, and at the free account level gives you the same number of icons that LJ intends to give you at the free account level.

Layout: I don't like the way the site looks.

Some people just don't like grey backgrounds or pink/purple/etc. If you don't like the default site scheme, there are options native to the site in your account management panel. If you want something a bit more familiar, color-wise, you can check out this fix to make DW look like the old LJ's color scheme on Chrome or Firefox. There's also a lot of fixes for the Stylish addon over here.

LiveJournal: Maybe they'll repeal the changes.

It has been made abundantly clear that the changes will not be repealed.

Livejournal: But they're going to make an S2 style that looks just like the old one.

You have to have a paid or plus account to use S2 style on your comment pages, making a workaround the privilege of the paying users. (A paid account is paid for with your money; a Plus account is paid for with the ad revenue they receive from all the ads you see when you browse the site. There is a Basic option that was once the default 'free' account, with only 6 icons, but all accounts are now created as Plus accounts automatically. (Even so, LJ has stated that within the next 6 months, S2 styles will also lose their subject lines/be affected by the changes, so the workaround style is highly likely to be rendered useless once that change rolls out.)

Invite Codes: I think DW is elitist/exclusive, invite codes are hard to get, what a hassle.

LJ used invite codes as well in the beginning. It's necessary for upstarts to ensure a sustainable growth. DW has had open account registrations in the past, as well as this December, and from what they've said that will continue to happen in the future. dw_codesharing usually has codes up for grabs, though if you're moving over a community, send in a support request and you'll get a special code that can be used by all the members of the community.

People: I think DW is full of 'social justice warriors'.

Social justice is a Thing everywhere, including the real world. Just because 'SJ warriors' were using the site before the vast majority of roleplayers were does not mean that the site is swarming with them. (If you don't bother them, they probably won't bother you. After all, this site is about freedom of content.)

I still don't know why we want to move.
There's two versions of this story: The really long one that starts in 2007, and the short one that started on December 12, 2011. I'm going to tell the short version because I'm lazy and this is the most offensive/fresh incident.

On 12/12, some random guy (

igrick) on the design team for LJ Russia posted in his personal journal outlining the upcoming changes to the commenting system. Though his post was in Russian, bilingual users quickly picked up on the post and translated it. The translation was posted on

fail_fandomanon, where it was quickly picked up by

rpanoncomm and people on Plurk. Users posted in

igrick's journal expressing their outrage. He accused them of being spammers, then made snide remarks in Russian to Russian users, generally being dismissive and rude.

Turns out that this

igrick dude is not just some random designer, though- He's Ilya Dronov, Head of Livejournal Russia.

LJ announced the changes on a

news post, and was again met with an onslaught of comments begging them to keep subject lines. The post was later edited to say that concerns were being taken into consideration, but LJ has said nothing except "subject lines still work in S2"- Though they are planning to apply the changes to S2 within the next 6 months, as well.

More translations of

igrick being rude and snide while talking about his customers have come up, and he has made it apparent that he has no consideration for the preferences of the English-speaking userbase. Livejournal has paid a company to redesign the entire site, so it is highly unlikely that they will roll back these changes after having made a monetary investment in the changes. (And when I say 'highly unlikely,' I mean 'on par with snowball's chances in Hell'.)

LJ is owned by SUP Russia. SUP Russia's LJ branch is run by

igrick.

igrick has made it clear that he doesn't care about the RP community's desires in this matter, and has in fact been nothing short of rude.

They aren't going to be rolling back the changes.

Over the past few days, users have been experiencing issues where journals that are set to a manual payment plan have had their payment options changing to automatic without their knowledge, consent, or action. The manager of Support called all users who had their payments switched to Automatic without their knowledge "liars and slanderers".

Past issues with LJ are bigger than most people think (or remember), as well. Here's a list of links from both past problems and the current situation:

A summary of LJ's past errors, slightly out of date but still informative.
Staff have invaded private journal entries, suspended users without cause, slandered users, and participated in suspect behavior.

On top of all of this, now comments made by journals deleted 2+ years ago are now showing as deleted on Livejournal. However, now there is evidence that this can be undone with an import of the journal to DW.

As of January 1, automatic payments have been turning on without notice, and LJ chose to respond to this issue by calling all users who experienced the issue liars who were trying to incite panic.

Thankfully, Livejournal is not the only option. Even though they've taken your money, and then chosen to give you awful customer service and ignore your feedback as a paying user, you can take your business elsewhere.

Welcome to Dreamwidth, everyone. Let's make it a great place to be.

I want to read more about LJ vs. DW.