Restricted Overrides

I'm sure most of you are aware that 'we' hate the style overrides feature. While it's supposed to be for making a few minor changes, Free Account users and some Paid Users who read the wrong instructions are setting entire styles in overrides to avoid buying a paid account.

Brad thought of a reasonable solution which works as follows:

• Users currently using overrides can continue with what they have.
• Users may only create new overrides which are permitted in the style documentation.
• Users may only modify overrides they are allowed to have.
• Once users have deleted the disallowed overrides, they will be unable to recreate them.

Brad asked me to write the code for this, and I submitted it to him an hour or so ago, so it could be implemented at any time from now. This is just a bit of warning since there are probably some FAQs and other documentation which refer to the use of variables which don't allow overrides.

The variables which permit overrides are *_HEAD, *_TALK_READLINK and *_TALK_LINKS. It would be a good idea to take a look over some of the documentation and remove anything which suggests that users may use variables other than this.

Update @ 18:25 GMT: I've since had some things I missed pointed out to me in the thread on this subject over in lj_support. I've contacted Brad asking that he add the variables I missed to the allowed list, which include: *_OPT_ITEMS, *_DATE_FORMAT and *_WEBSITE. The last one allows Opi's howto to still work, as keeping _WEBSITE was my intention when I first started on this. Sorry for the confusion and annoyance.