Right, then.  My initial reaction (see above, long since, on page 7) was the simple, pained reaction of a man suddenly confronted with something hideously ugly.

My opinion of the ‘proposed’ change – ‘proposed’ in rather the sense that Tony Blair and his gang ‘suggest’ things that immediately become mandatory, and sod what the electorate actually choose – has only declined, since.

Now, I don’t know whether these changes do or don’t tend to make Live Journal look more like certain other websites.  I don’t know that, because I don’t use or visit those other websites.  That’s rather the bloody point, damn it: I don’t care to use other sites if, indeed, they’ve the sort of shockingly ugly, inane, and useless layout you propose.

When I go to the information page on a user, I expect, curiously enough, to find information about that user.  Salient information, not whether she went to Roedean or he went to Slough Grammar or they both went to some comprehensive somewhere.  I don’t even care if the user had been up at Fenland Poly, I try to be accepting of others’s misfortunes.  IN FACT, THE SCHOOLS INFORMATION IS PARTICULARLY USELESS IN THAT ANYONE CAN CLAIM TO HAVE BEEN AT ANY SCHOOL, REGARDLESS OF TRUTH.  (I don’t list school and university because of just that, and because we who are mere pseudonyms have no business claiming such connexions.  The point remains that I could easily, if in no very convincing accents, profess to be a product of the Ecole Normale Superiéur, the Sorbonne, Heidelberg for a DPhil, and Patrice Lumumba University on a KGB bursary, with no one to say me nay and no barrier to my doing so.)  I’m not interested in the user’s user number, seniority, or how often she posts twee little comments.

What I want to know is precisely what is set forth clearly on the current page: Who the bugger is, where his other website and thus his writings are, what his email address is, and what, in his own words, he says of himself in his biographical information.  Next, I want to see, at a glance, what interests and what friends she has, and what of those we’ve in common – in bold print.  Only then might I conceivably be interested – in fact, I never am – in such pointless minutiae as account type, date created, number of comments, and posting access.

And I, like not a few of your customers – I want to emphasise that word: CUSTOMERS – over the age of forty, object particularly strenuously to columns and boxes and other damned things that still further reduce text size and visibility.  If you wanted to work on something to improve the site, you should have begun with text sizes.  There’s a reason why it is that I use 14-point to post things.  I understand from other posts that those who suffer rather more visual problems than do I, and who use a ‘reader’ for this sort of thing, are peculiarly badly affected by this bollocks of a ‘proposed’ ‘improvement’: I had been under the impression that both the oh-so-bien-pensant Californian ethos AND positive US law required making things accessible to the disabled?

And I now return to that word, CUSTOMERS.  Patrons of your little shop.  Some of us, at least, are paid accounts.  Some of us, in fact, are permanent accounts, duly paid for – and, apparently, we are ‘stuck’ with a bad bargain.  Now, sub specie aeternitatis, the amount of specie one splashed out for a permanent account is not great; on the other hand, eighty-one quid is a steepish price for a dubious privilege and a mere diversion, a hobby-horse.  But permanent account holders will, in the main, have paid their pounds over in reliance on the assurances – which appear increasingly to have been false, not to say fraudulent – that the change in ownership would not lead to the wholesale wrecking of the damned site.

We would appear to have been cheated.

This idea wants to be taken to the bottom of the garden and humanely killed.  It is only through a considerable exercise of Christian charity that I do not suggest that the same be done with those whose idea it was.

I do note that, on your sample page, the scrap of biography that appears lists you as ‘working at Six Apart … until they kick me out in disgrace’: I’d urge you not to propose a vote of confidence in this thread, as it seems manifestly evident that most of us would say that that time has long since arrived.