OpenDiary.Com Comments
http://www.mydeardiary.com

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Open diary is awesome, well, was awesome. Its got the best layout that I have seen, it lets users and non users alike post notes on the bottom of entries, and the diarys are really customisable. Your diary is hosted on a really abstract URL, and you can change the title, or your author name any time you want. Its an awesome community, athors visit eachother writing notes and forming friendships. ( When an author is logged in and he/she leaves a note it automatically uts a link to that persons diary.)

Recently open diary started pop up ads allong with an existing banner thats on the top, amd the server is acting weird. Sometimes I have to hit the refresh button up to five or six times before it displays the page Im looking at...hm....

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httP://www.nightwalker.uni.cc

Open Diary used to be great. It's where I started my journal.

Now I don't even bother. It slowly went downhill. First it was down a lot. Couldn't access the site for a week. Then the pop up ads started, and there was never a "paid account" option so you could get rid of them.

No customizable design like livejournal has, but still it wasn't too bad. The ads did annoy me though.

I abandoned my opendiary account for a livejournal account, and then moved it all to my domain when I bought it.

The difference is that I still check livejournal. I don't bother with opendiary anymore.

Open Diary has completely gone down hill. I've been using it for a while, and it was good. Now, it's down a lot, and they're pushing a subscription site, Open Diary Plus. I can't pay for that. There are constant notes from the "Diary Master" saying that they are not sure how long open diary will last with all the expenses and such. Pop up ads are everywhere and its a pain. I need a new service. SOMEONE PLEASE GIVE ME A LIVE JOURNAL CREATION CODE!!!!!!!!!!!!! PLEASE!!!!!!!!!
email me if you can help!!!

Right now I have a diary on FOD = Free Open Diary and OD= Open Diary Plus. Free Open Diary is of course free. In this version of OD you get pop up ads galore which drive me nuts. The server is slow and tends to go down whenever I want to do something. Well not all the time but a lot more than other sites. On FOD you can't post images but you still get the basic functions of OD such as you can leave notes on other peoples diaries, you can change the background of your diary with a image or a font that OD provides and you can post to diary circles or write about the theme. On OD+ the server is much better. There are no pop up ads and you get more choices from the backgrounds and images you can use. Its really hard to make a custom template on OD though. The subscription is $20 for 6months. Its a really great site, I have met so many cool people out there. You leave a note and people actually respond. That has what has kept me hooked to the site. Unfortunately the head of the site has been MIA for a while. There have been problems with different functions of the site like with renewing subscriptions and him not replying to emails. Also people have been putting codes in notes that seem to mess up the coding in diaries and just a whole mess. The Diary Master has not commented on any of it or done anything about it. Im afraid that if he doesn't a lot of people are going to leave the site.

I've had a diary at both FreeOpenDiary and TeenOpenDiary, which use a similar format and are run by the same people. Both are frankly, horrible. FOD/TOD have two levels of privacy, public and private. This can be applied to either the entire diary or a single entry. Notes can be restricted to "Safe" (only registered users), "All" and "No. Notes also allow too much use of HTML, which causes some problems due to the fact that many members of FOD/TOD have nothing better to do then create codes that mess up your note list. Notes are limited to 400 charreters, which can be result in four or five notes from one person just trying to get out what they wanted to say.
Pictures using the standard image code are not allowed to be posted in diary entries, they just don't show up. Almost all HTML beyond the basics has to be modified/distorted so the server will accept it. FOD/TOD HTML is like some bastard, wayward son of the true HTML/Java/CSS scripts. A diary on FOD/TOD has an annoying menu on both the top and the left in which various links are foced on every page of the user's diary. There's a rather short limit (6,500 charreters) to an entry and to one's main page. If you go over the limit on an entry, you need to make two seperate entries, if you go over your limit on editing your main page, something malfunctions and all of the sudden you've lost your entry table and you have to do this whole song and dance to get it back.
The server is down constantly and has an annoying habit of not registering entries, so you loose the entire entry. The sites are never updated.... on both of them, they've had the same "Theme of the Week" for about four months. Both sites are easy to "hack", and have been done so by various immature people. A code is released and suddenly hundreds of diaries are ruined. It takes the webmasters at least a week to even realize that this has happened and to get rid of the code. If you email the webmasters for help, you will get none. I have tried to email them many times, reporting problems and asking for help and never once have I gotten a response.
To sum it up, a diary on FOD/TOD is just not worth the frustration it causes. Save yourself the trouble and go with diaryland or diaryX.
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