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Recently I posted this support request, then started looking through the other requests. So far the LJ support system has received 397,737 requests, of which 1,101 are still unclosed (but only 657 are listed here). All but 104 are believed resolved and awaiting confirmation from the original requestor.
Of the 104 pending requests, there are four besides mine that are complaining about comments disappearing from old LiveJournal posts. Those four are all dated a week ago. Unfortunately I cannot see how many *closed* requests there are on this topic.
If we assume that 3% or less of users affected by a problem will actually complain, this implies that there are hundreds (at least) of journals that have lost comments on old posts. Yours could be next! If you care, you might want to try backing up your comments. Unfortunately, there is no nice-and-easy way to do that. LJ offers only the export_comments.bml system, which makes it quite difficult to match up the comments with the posts they attach to. Alternatively, you can also save the comment-received emails that LJ sends you, although several times recently there have been glitches where these emails were not sent for a long time or were never sent.
One of the things I like about LJ, which I think affects the kinds of posts that people want to make here, is that it still retains the feel of the "overgrown college-student hobby project" that it started out as. Now that LJ has been sold, it might start getting more professional and that feeling may fade. Disappearing comments are par for the course in a large evolving software project, but I'd like to know whether the LJ staff will own up to the existence of this problem.
Meta-comment about topics: When I started this journal, I had originally planned for each post to be on a different subject, but quite often I have ended up making two consecutive posts on each topic. This is my second post about the workings of LJ.
Of the 104 pending requests, there are four besides mine that are complaining about comments disappearing from old LiveJournal posts. Those four are all dated a week ago. Unfortunately I cannot see how many *closed* requests there are on this topic.
If we assume that 3% or less of users affected by a problem will actually complain, this implies that there are hundreds (at least) of journals that have lost comments on old posts. Yours could be next! If you care, you might want to try backing up your comments. Unfortunately, there is no nice-and-easy way to do that. LJ offers only the export_comments.bml system, which makes it quite difficult to match up the comments with the posts they attach to. Alternatively, you can also save the comment-received emails that LJ sends you, although several times recently there have been glitches where these emails were not sent for a long time or were never sent.
One of the things I like about LJ, which I think affects the kinds of posts that people want to make here, is that it still retains the feel of the "overgrown college-student hobby project" that it started out as. Now that LJ has been sold, it might start getting more professional and that feeling may fade. Disappearing comments are par for the course in a large evolving software project, but I'd like to know whether the LJ staff will own up to the existence of this problem.
Meta-comment about topics: When I started this journal, I had originally planned for each post to be on a different subject, but quite often I have ended up making two consecutive posts on each topic. This is my second post about the workings of LJ.
