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dreamwidth, this is not a love letter

So! I left Livejournal in part because it wasn't very friendly to OpenID accounts and Dreamwidth was like "OpenID! HELLS YEAH!". Well, I have discovered that, surprise, the same problem I had on Livejournal with OpenID and links, happens here — if someone uses an OpenID account and tries to leave me a link, it strips it. I mean, wow, way to kill an exchange of ideas. See my latest post that is dead in the water! On top of the OpenID barrier, which I hoped people might cross, they were further going to have any links they included stripped? Wow, that is the opposite of a gold-plated invitation to use a site.

I, as a blogger/journal keeper who often solicits links from people, have moved to a service where few people have an account, and OpenID users, my friends and readers I have that I don't know yet, the silent people, who I will oftentimes solicit links from so they can add to the conversation and cite things, are still treated like they're out to spam the site. On Livejournal I had the benefit, at least, that people could get an account. Here I do not have the luxury that people are going to pay for an account, even if it's one time, to comment on my posts.

I was advised that there's a patch for this on the way, so I could grant access to OpenID accounts and allow them to leave links. I am so irked at this idea I could scream. Not only does it not solve my problem at all, it creates more problems for me, because I would have to create an entirely new access filter. On top of that, in my support reply I stated that I solicit links from people I might not know that are reading. I am not psychic. I can't not read the mind of the Randon Stranger #8352 who is going to comment on my post next week when I ask for people to leave me links of the GREATEST CATS VIDEOS THEY'VE EVER SEEN.

I was also pointed at this suggestion post, where the one of the owners of the site I have chosen to move myself to and champion and defend, says,

I let the suggestion through so that people can discuss whether or not that should be changed, but given the prevalence of spam on the internet (and yes, a lot of it is OpenID spam, because many services treat an OpenID account like a verified account -- which is precisely why we don't, not exactly) I really, really, really don't think it'll change without good reason.

Awesome. All my problems with Livejournal's support of OpenID? Repeated in the place I chose to move. There are smart people here. They really can't come up with any other way to address this issue besides making users grant access to possible strangers or treating OpenID account hyperlinks like they don't matter? Am I seriously the only one who does this? Do people only use LJ clones/forks to shut the rest of the internet out?

Copy-pasting is no joke, and when people see they're going to be treated that way when sharing links, a hurdle put up in front of links they leave? They're not going to comment. I lose my dialogue. Is that a good enough reason to figure out a solution that's not terrible and addresses people who want to interact with the rest of the internet? My OpenID friends and OpenID strangers who I also welcome here specifically so I can make new connections and friends don't feel like they're at home in my space. Any dialogue I want to have that involves links? I specifically can't have with people not on this service unless they don't mind being treated like they're untrustworthy.

So there goes the awesome cat video thread I was going to start.

I get that spam is an issue and I don't want to hurt the service because I like the service, but this just seems a bait and switch — I had to discover this through trying to start an interactive discussion that required links and the ability to link, and a friend learned the hard way and my discussion I hoped would be awesome is now pretty much dead. I'm disappointed and feel totally mislead.

Interoperability? Really?