The requisite "OMG they've changed LJ" post.

[brooksmoses]

But they have!

I went to the "viewing options" page (to see if it had a tickbox to turn off those really annoying little "snapshot" pop-ups that are appearing on links all over the site now), and noticed that the selection of viewing schemes had changed.

There is no more Dystopia scheme.

There is no more Dystopia scheme.

I am currently using the Dystopia scheme, so it hasn't actually gone away, but as soon as my browser loses the relevant cookie, I won't be able to get it back. This is very distressing. I do not like the other schemes. lilairen and I gripe to each other about "my first livejournal" settings when things revert to something other than Dystopia in our browsers.

Have I sufficiently explained my distress? This is something that is in some way "home", and they've come in and redecorated. Except that it's not even that; they're just waiting for my browser to make a bobble, so they can come in and do it to me. And it's there, waiting, like the paisley curtains of Damocles.

Bleah.

Anyhow, it turns out that to disable the annoying popups, you wait for one to pop up, and click on one of the little tiny icons in the upper right corner of the popup window, and select "disable" off its pop-up menu, and then click the "save" button that shows up. And reload the page. (You have to actually reload, not just go to another LJ page, because this is in css templating or somesuch and those don't generally reload from page to page.)

(And how is there not a standard "unhappy" mood, anyway?)

EDIT: redbird pointed out here that there's an undocumented feature that enables one to still select Dystopia. The trick is that putting a "?view=schemes" on the end of the usual URL for the settings page (link) causes it to display all of the available schemes, rather than just the three most favored ones.

Comments

[julesjones]

Oh.

I'd vaguely noticed those new icons this morning, wondered what they meant, and promptly forgot about them because I was half asleep.

I *hate* SnapShot (seen it on other sites and found it intrusive in more ways than one). Thank you for the warning and instructions.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

I just played around with some of the new themes, and I resent the implication that my layout (modified classic) is boring and I ought to exchange it for something new and exciting, because my journal is my journal and it's just not the same in any other layout. When I had to change from S1 to S2, I spent a painstaking day reconstructing the settings so it would still look like my journal.

As for the cookie: can you find it, save it, and edit the expiry date to 2050?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

What are you talking about? There are more dystopia schemes than you can shake a stick at!

Oh. A Dystopia Scheme. Never mind, then.

[redbird]

If you run AdBlock Plus, you won't see those pop-ups. Among other nice things it protects me from. (Disclaimer: I don't know if AdBlock Plus works in IE; I'm using Firefox and am fairly sure it works in other mozilla-family browsers.)

[rosefox]

Ah, is that why I'm not getting them. Excellent. *)

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

rosefox put a fix in for me using a greasemonkey script called Bring_Back_Dystopia. It's not *exactly* the same, but the overall look is still similar.

[kightp.livejournal.com]

Bleah. I love Dystopia, hate the other schemes and will be very unhappy if it goes away.

On the other hand, the LJ Portal page (my preferred entry point, because the new "home" page sucks like a thing that sucks mightily) has regained its working birthday notification list. Which is good.

[11011110.livejournal.com]

There's also a checkbox "Enable graphic previews on external links within your journal" on Journal->Settings. I think maybe that one is for what other people see when they go to your lj, while the popup menu item is for what you see in your own browsing? But I used both and I still sometimes see them, so...

[lcohen]

what the hell is their beef with dystopia? it seems like they've been trying to kill it off since year two, and it's not like anyone is forcing *them* to use it--why can't they leave it alone?