Two damn things...

[eregyrn]

Grrr, okay. I can ask about this here, on the off chance that anybody who has friended me has run into these problems and found out the solutions already. Or, I can write to LJ's customer service, if such a beast exists, because the online FAQs are not helping me.

Problem Number One - Hinky Friends List Behavior

I discovered this today. I have raqs friended. I filter my Friends list between two groups, one of which is displayed as the default; she is on both filtered lists, actually. Last night (I think), I saw that she had posted a very short update. When I checked my LJ flist this morning, I happened to notice that this short post from her wasn't showing up on either of my filtered flists. So I went to her LJ, where I found both that post, still there, *and* a subsequent longer post from her made the same evening.

To make it even weirder, though: her post before that, (August 9, 5:01pm), *does* show up on both of my filtered flists. Just, not either of her posts from August 10. (Except, the first post from August 10 did the last time I checked my LJ last night.)

Further data: the posts aren't locked in any way. She still has me friended. (Well, she'd BETTER; but yes, I checked.) I can see them when I look at her LJ entries page. I made sure she was still on my filtered lists. I tried completely deleting my filtered lists, and remaking them. I logged out of LJ and logged back in. I looked at the Friends page of someone else who I know has her friended (my_tallest), and discovered the same thing -- her August 9th post shows up in his flist, but not either of her posts from August 10th. So it's not just me. *BUT*, she has gotten comments to at least the first August 10th post from someone else. So somebody is seeing her posts on their flist.

About the only thing I haven't done (yet) is shut this damn computer down and rebooted. Off to try that. But seriously. THE HELL?


Problem Number Two - Hinky Comments Page Behaviors

Okay. I'm a paid member and all. I should have all the bells and whistles. Apparently (I gather) there are two different styles for LJ designs. And fewer people seem to be using Style 2. But every once in a while, I run across somebody who, when I go to their LJ and read their entry and click on their comments, I see the *entry* just fine, but the comments? No personal LJ icons, for one thing, but most strikingly,

Every
comment
looks
like
this
with
just
one
word
,
or
sometimes
punctuation
mark,
per
line.
And
obviously
it
is
really
REALLY
annoying
to
read
longer
comments
like
this.

Ugh. I used to notice it in tempe's LJ, until she switched layouts. Most recently, I noticed it in brighidestone's LJ. I mentioned it once in a thread at tempe's LJ, and others said it wasn't happening to them. (I assume it mustn't, or else the user would become aware of it and try to fix it.)

If I go check the option to display comments to entries on my flist in the style of my *own* LJ, then that's fine. But (picky, picky), I also find that boring. I *like* it that when I click on the comments to people's entries, it takes me to *their* layout. Because while I love my layout, I don't want to look at it to the exclusion of all others. Bring on the rich diversity of the LJ community, I say!

But the format above? Has got to go. Why can I not make it go? Why does it happen to me? *whine*

***

Okay, okojosan gets the prize for answering Problem Number One -- after speaking to raqs on the phone, have determined that she did, indeed, go back and BACKDATE both of those entries. Because, for some reason, her laptop had become convinced that it was August 20th, and accordingly, those two entries were originally from the future. She went back in and backdated them to the correct date, and voila -- they're gone! From everyone's flist, apparently?

I still think it's weird that backdating should cause this to happen, but at least it's happening for *a* reason.

Comments

[eregyrn.livejournal.com]

Hi, Andrea! *waves*

Okay, I...mostly...understood that. I'm not very html-savvy.

The thing is...when I have experienced this in others' LJs, the actual original message has never contained one of those meme/quiz tables. I don't know if there has been one of them pasted in, in some previous post in the LJ. So -- would the user having pasted one in once have caused the comments in *all subsequent posts* to be screwed up like this?

And further -- I have, in a few cases, talked to the people with the LJs where I notice these things. I've posted comments in the threads that say, "I'm seeing all these comments looking like this". And the LJ owner, and other users commenting, have always said, "Huh, it looks fine to us".

If pasted-in bad html were causing the problem, shouldn't everbody see it?

[shoka.livejournal.com]

Eep, sorry about the detailed html-speak. I often forget that most people don't look at raw html *blush*.

Hmm, the 'all subsequent posts', definitely doesn't sound like a quiz/meme thing. If it's bad html, it's something in the LJ style or something about the content of the entry being posted.

When it looks fine for other folks and not you, it happens. It could be that the page is cached for you and the person who posted the fubared entries has fixed it, though this is less likely if you say subsequent pages are also fubared. Could be that your browser behaves differently than browsers used by the other folks. Unfortunately, different browsers (IE, Mozilla, Netscape, Opera, etc) often handle html in subtly different ways, sometimes resulting in gross visual differences when the page is displayed. Worse yet, different versions of the same browsers will also sometimes behave differently.

If you have one of the fubared pages which you can share, I'd happily take a look at it. I'm curious now to see if I figure out what's wrong.

[eregyrn.livejournal.com]

In my entry, click on the link to brighidestone's LJ; that is the most recent one in which I have noticed this happening.

Her most recent entry doesn't necessarily count, because it *does* have a pasted-in quiz/meme table. :)

But I looked at some of her entries before that, which don't, and I still see this happening with all replies to her posts.

(It used to happen in tempe's LJ too, but as I said, she changed the layout and now I don't notice it happening any more with her.)

[shoka.livejournal.com]

Ack, mised the link in your entry.

I should have started with asking for your browser, because it's actually not bad html. I checked brighidestone's entry in all the browsers I have immediately on hand and it worked most everywhere (Mozilla 1.7 (linux), Mozilla 1.4 (windows), IE 6 w/ xp sp2 (windows) and Safari ? (mac osx.2)).

The I tried IE on the mac. IE 5.2 fails in the exact way you describe. okojosan just told me you are likely using a Mac, so I'm guessing that is the problem.

IE pre-6.0 had very poor handling for some 'newer' features of html. I say newer in quotes because they were around for a while and IE was late in picking some of them up, though has been pretty good since 6.0. IE 5.x also had fairly poor handling for something called Cascading Style Sheets, which are used extensively by LJ to allow you to easily change colors, font styles, etc if you want to customize your LJ's style.

I hate to say it, but I think there is no fix short of switching browsers if you can. I'm pro-Mozilla (mostly so I see the same pages on what ever type of computer I'm using), but Safari uses the same rendering engine and according to the Mac guy I work with, has a more traditional Mac-like interface.

[eregyrn.livejournal.com]

As Karena suspected -- I'm using a Mac, running OS 9, and my browser is IE 5.1.7.

The idea that this is what's causing the trouble makes sense to me. :) I know there are other buggy things about IE 5.x.

Now I cannot remember whether I'm having the same problems at home, or what (where I have a Mac also, but running OSX; in which case, I'm not sure if I have a different version of IE? Maybe? I can't recall if I have noticed this bug when browsing at home, or not).

The only other browser that I have on this OS9 machine is Netscape 4.77...and I just tried to look at the problem-LJ in question, and it didn't even want to deal.

Will have to experiment when I get home. I have more options there.

Good to know that there is at least *a* reason!

[shoka.livejournal.com]

The last version of IE I know of for the Mac is 5.2. I'd not expect Netscape 4.anything to cope with most LJ styles. NS4 had really basic, bare bones CSS support, amid other issues.

If you have OSX at home and haven't tried it, definitely try Safari. It renders the problem LJs nicely.

[nostalgia-lj.livejournal.com]

I get the weird off-to-the-side thing and I'm using Firefox 0.9...

I AM A FREAK!