Here's a comprehensive post of the workarounds for LJ's new comment pages. Feel free to share this, comment on what you've found that can help, etc etc. I'll keep this post open and I'll also update it when new things are brought out!

As of December 21st, there is a temporary work around around the comment page style. The person is still developing it, but has released what they have done so far to the general public. If you'd like to offer assistance, I know that the person would really appreciate it. I also know that through plurk, someone is going to offer to work on redesigning the comment pages to be like the old one.

As far as the preview button is concerned, I haven't discovered any sort of fix for that around LJ, however I do offer this to preview your HTML as well as a spellchecker if your browser of choice does not supply you with one.

If you have anything else to offer, go right ahead and leave me a comment! This will also be featured on my plurk for those who wish to contact me through there.

After I typed this entry, I have noticed that the old browse box is still available. You can see that here with my own icons as part of the box itself. I don't know if LJ's going to do away with this, but it's still there!

Edit #1 If you add "?format=light" to the end of the URL (for example, http://advancing.livejournal.com/133124.html?format=light), it removes the bottom scroll bar as seen here to make things look cleaner and neater. I've also discovered that adding "?view=flat" at the end of the URL also works. This can also be useful in LJ communities, as seen here. It doesn't offer hierarchical view, however it does work.

Edit #2 I've found that street_of_mercy's layouts has the old options back, same as the hover menus. You can see how their Colorful Grey layout does this here, for an example. As turncloak has suggested, mintyapple also offers a few layouts right here. They have a tag for these sorts of layouts here!

I have been informed that Minimalism layouts still have the old comment pages, too. You can find all of them here. A friend of mine has also told me that they "managed to make a workable journal layout with this. I set my journal style to minimalism (in my case, aquatic moon) with custom comments on, used the CSS provided here, and set the dropdowns on the custom CSS page to Yes to stylesheets and No to theme stylesheets. I know it's not very pretty looking, but it's functional and it's a relatively quick fix to do."

Edit #3 If you'd like to see how the Russian users are handling this change, you can check out the community ruljautonews. The translations are by no means perfect, however just like we are frustrated and pitching fits about this change, they have expressed similar complaints about it.

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I would like to apologize for how long it's taken me to get around to editing this entry, however I've been looking around for a few scripts that can help out with LJ as a whole.

First off is Adblock Plus for both Chrome and Firefox. I personally use this one and you can help customize it against YouTube embeds, Facebook addons and more. What this is going to do is whenever you load a page on LiveJournal, it won't benefit from the ad revenue the site will gain, therefore cutting more profit away from LJ as a whole.

If you're familiar with writing code on the fly, then Greasemonkey is for you. But, if you don't have knowledge in writing scripts, then don't worry - you can go to userscripts.org and it'll automatically install the scripts right there for you. I also use a script called LJ Bannering that disables the monthly banner and replaces it with the dark blue one. As you can see here, it works!

To go through multiple LJ accounts at once, you'll want to install LJLogin, a client I wholeheartedly use. It also doesn't exclusively work for LJ, either! It can work for sites such as InsaneJournal, Dreamwidth, Scribbld, etc. This way, you don't have to constantly login and logout via the site when you want to use a different account.

Hand-in-hand with RPers and people who make long posts, Lazarus is, to be frank, a god send. If you somehow manage to close out of your browser or a specific tab, Lazarus will save the text/form and it'll automatically be up the next time you wish to comment.

As historychick49 has pointed out, the LiveJournal extension for Chrome as well as LiveJournal hook will allow you to view pages in your own style if you don't have a paid or a permanent account! It'll be plenty useful for how things are right now as far as LJ is concerned.

I'm still looking for other add-ons, but if anyone has anything to offer that wasn't described here or in this entry, then please let me know and I'll append it to the entry!