heidi | I just replied on News.

LJ is reportedly about to discontinue having Subject lines in Replies to posts, and changing the way the Expand feature works, as per discussion here. Given my work on the

help_haiti comm, I have feelings that I wanted to expand beyond my initial do not want so here's what I posted here

news.

Hi! About two years ago, I founded the LJ comm help_haiti to fundraise and host an auction to support the rescue of survivors and the rebuilding of Haiti after one of the worst earthquakes on record.

The LiveJournal platform was wonderfully suited for our auction to take place on, in large part because the subject lines of the Offerings were informative and evocative, and because of the ability to Expand a discussion to bidders could easily see all the threads.

Because of the way the community was organized on LiveJournal, we raised about 125,000 for charities that helped Haiti and its citizens.

In the ensuing 23 months, over a dozen communities, including help_chile, help_japan and others, have been created with similar purposes and missions, and astoundingly fantastic fundraising totals.

We at help_haiti greatly appreciated the support that LiveJournal gave to the project; it was the first time that LJ had set up a Virtual Gift tied to a specific community's fundraising project, and it was promoted by news. Authors like Neil Gaiman posted about it and promoted the project on their Twitter feeds and blogs. It brought people to LJ who hadn't been here before.

At the time, we appreciated LJ's support of the project and since then, as I said, other charitable projects have as well.

These projects will not be able to be hosted on LiveJournal if Subject Lines are eliminated from the Reply process. It will be difficult, if not impossible, to host such projects on LiveJournal if Offerors and Bidders can't Expand the comment threads.

Please, reconsider the design, so that beneficial, charitable, helpful projects like this can continue when needed.