DIE, SNAP! DIE!!
11 November 2007 17:00![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vakkotaurAn update or so ago LiveJournal made (yet another) boneheaded move and added a misfeature from snap.com that does nothing but get in the way. I have yet to see anyone besides the folks making the announcement claim this was a good idea. But, it can be turned off. In a disappointingly limited way. I can, and have, set the "never show this on MY account" flag. Alas, not everyone has set that flag so. And not everyone can. There is no simple flag that does the Right Thing, which is "never show this crap to me, ever."
Ah, but there's a link when it shows up to let me turn it off. What a freaking joke. It doesn't work. It doesn't even have a button to make it work. It only has the CANCEL button, when it has a button at all. What moron designed that interface? Oh, I know, someone in snap.com marketing. Driven to distraction, I resorted to visiting the evil snap.com itself and finding the rather hidden (and javascript dependent!) control that sets a freaking cookie that says, "Don't bother me." Great! It worked. Then I closed the browser. And when I started it up again, all was well until just a while ago when I started to read a page then *wham* it changed and this snap crap appeared again. Granted, if I don't override CSS (which I do to make other journals readable without having to constantly click the button that reloads a page with ?style=mine appended) then it doesn't appear. But it should even be there. The waste of bandwidth should never have been sent.
This sort of crap is why Orvan's journal is on a different, more competently run, site.
Now to look for a way to turn that crap off so it stays off.
ADDENDUM: Haven't found the ideal solution, but did add the KILL SNAPSH*T link to the link list so I don't have wade trhough snap.crap to find the only thing on the entire wretched site worth using.
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no subject
Date: 12 Nov 2007 00:46 (UTC)no subject
Date: 12 Nov 2007 01:51 (UTC)SnapSh*t takes what would be a nice normal link and screws it up by changing it so that when you put the pointer over it a subwindow pops up showing a preview of the link. This gets in the way, chews up machine cycles and bandwidth, and lets trolls have fun with goatse type links. Even with plug-ins turned off (as snapsh*t depends on Flash) I still can see a big blot on a page with the thing. What happens is that the page loads like normal, then just as I can start to read it it's like it reloads and the content is shoved down below the edge of the browser window so reason I'm looking at the page goes away. And on top is this blot from snap.com like one of those sub-windows, only without content, and there are a few links, none of which are actually useful and the one that would be useful (to turn it off) doesn't work.
no subject
Date: 12 Nov 2007 01:53 (UTC)It hasn't much bothered my besides being pretty useless. I've never wished that I could see a little preview of a page before clicking on it.
no subject
Date: 12 Nov 2007 02:18 (UTC)Almost nobody has. I think it's a toy for the MySpace crowd. Slashdot had a problem with trolls that put links in comments, links that looked like they might be useful or interesting but just went to goatse. Their solution was to change how links looked in comments. Instead of, "Try Google (http://www.yahoo.com/)." Which is misleading (the link really goes to Yahoo) they looked like this: "Try Google (http://www.yahoo.com/) [www.yahoo.com]." And if that bothered you, you could turn the feature off for your account so that you wouldn't see [stuff in brackets] if you didn't want to.
What Slashdot did was the opposite of what LJ did in many ways. It made life harder for trolls. It didn't chew up significant bandwidth or machine cycles (hey, my laptop is a PII-266, every cycle matters!) and the control did the right thing.
no subject
Date: 12 Nov 2007 10:06 (UTC)Though I usually look at the address of a site when I hover the cursor over it anyway. Doesn't it always appears somewhere at the bottom of all browsers when you point at a link?
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Date: 12 Nov 2007 12:00 (UTC)It is. Thus the contrast between a site run by geeks for geeks, and a site run by marketing for marketing.
It does, assuming javascript isn't messing up the status bar with stupid scrolling crap - one of the many reasons I generally keep javascript off. And you need to remember to look, which doesn't always happen. Opera will show the link address near the link if the pointer dwells on the link... which is good as long as nothing else is interfering and, say, popping up a preview windowlet.
no subject
Date: 12 Nov 2007 16:49 (UTC)no subject
Date: 13 Nov 2007 11:11 (UTC)How is it that some folks who design web sites forget that a site needs to be friendly to users to be successful? Bells and whistles aren't much good if they distract from the site's purpose.
Breaking the status bar is neither a bell nor a whistle. It's an invitation to saavy users NOT to click links on the offending page. There are very few situations in which one would need to hide the URL for a link (click-your-own-adventure type web games come right to mind).
Heh... don't even get me started on junk text scrolling across the status bars. Marquees stink no matter where they show up, in my opinion. If I wanted a stock ticker, I'd watch FNN.
no subject
Date: 12 Nov 2007 02:07 (UTC)no subject
Date: 12 Nov 2007 05:51 (UTC)no subject
Date: 12 Nov 2007 12:02 (UTC)That, or close, was what I wound up doing. It still bugs me that I had to resort to that rather simply set one global control on LJ, but LJ thoughtlessly did not provide the proper control.
no subject
Date: 13 Nov 2007 10:54 (UTC)I already killed Snapcrap in my HOSTS file. Unfortunately, Intellitxt's setup requires a per-site disabling in HOSTS, it seems, but happily I don't use many sites that are afflicted with it... so far.
After years and years of people trying to shut off things that pop up, materialize, fly across the screen, flash madly, or otherwise disturb the browsing experience... why the CRAP would anyone think introducing new technologies to do the same thing would be a GOOD idea?
Unintellitxt
Date: 13 Nov 2007 11:12 (UTC)After years and years of people trying to shut off things that pop up, materialize, fly across the screen, flash madly, or otherwise disturb the browsing experience... why the CRAP would anyone think introducing new technologies to do the same thing would be a GOOD idea?
Recall the Animaniacs segments GOOD IDEA/BAD IDEA? This is similar: GOOD IDEA / MARKETING IDEA. I generally keep javascript off just because of crap like this. There are a (very) few sites I do allow javascript. "But you're missing the full web experience!" Yep, I'm missing having every loudmouth carnival barker distracting me as they hawk their rigged games and cheap junk.
Re: Unintellitxt
Date: 14 Nov 2007 03:28 (UTC)It's going to be interesting designing pages so that they work both with and without JS enabled. I'm looking forwards to the challenge.
Re: Unintellitxt
Date: 14 Nov 2007 04:15 (UTC)I can set site preferences for the place that use scripting in a useful way, so that's what I do. And it's fairly simple for me to switch scripting on and off. I love the control I have with Opera.
Graceful degradation is a concern. Sometimes JS is required, but those times are not as often as it is used, alas.