Public Service Announcement

[vakkotaur]

If anyone reading didn't realize what exactly my last post was about, the explanation is here and here.

Also, take a look at your settings page and make sure the new options (scroll to the bottom) are set they way you want them. As usual, the defaults SixApart/LiveJournal made for you are probably not the settings you'd choose.

Comments

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I find SixApart's explanations, policy, and justifications utterly incomprehensible and obfuscated. They seem just to be setting themselves up in a position to make more arbitrary judgements and take summary actions without appeal, as they've been doing all along anyway.

The really amusing part is their assumption that they actually have any valid determination whatsoever of the age of LJ writers or readers.

Some other site is looking more and more attractive every day.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

There's good reason that Orvan* is over on InsaneJournal (http://www.insanejournal.com/), and that the last time I spent any money on a journal it was over there.

I do think it has a lot to do with being seen as "doing something" to soothe advertisers, potential investors or potential buyers, and appease with-hunting idiots. It's not entirely a bad idea, but as usual they took a not bad idea and managed to screw it up. As jmaynard has said about others, they seem to have the Midas Muffler Touch: anything they touch turns into a muffler.

Contrast all the gyrations, postings, explanations, clarifications of the explanations, explanations of the clarifications, system modifications ("We can't handle the Strikethrough criticism so we'll change it to bold which will cause confusion but make us feel better." and the current silliness) and just plain stalling of 6A/LJ... with a single paragraph in a short statement issued by IJ when the Strikethrough mess blew up in 6A/LJ's face:

I am solely responsible for the sites content, design, administration, and ultimately decisions by our abuse team. I am proud to say that in the almost 6 year life of this site we have had to suspend fewer than a handful of journals, and we would like to keep it that way. Unless there is a DMCA violation or a court order to remove content, we will not delete journals. (http://squeaky.insanejournal.com/63787.html)

---

* I have an account there as well. I just haven't copied everything over there and started always simulcasting... yet.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, I'm sure you're right that it's that same old "see, we're working on it" syndrome, much like airplane security where being obnoxious and invasive is somehow supposed to convince people that they are safer. I even suspect that they feel they need to censor a certain quota amount of material regularly now in order to prove they are doing something, and don't much care what it really is that they are stomping on. It's the stomping that matters, not the target..

Those magic words are present: "family" and "child". They allow absolutely any sort of abuse, as long as it is done in their name.

[yakko.livejournal.com]

On "copying everything over" to another LJ-powered site... can I do that? Because it's something I genuinely have to think about now, with these poorly-implemented "features" and entities other than Abuse suspending accounts because their users have too many tags. At least last time I was warned, I went ahead and set up a double on InsaneJournal, so I'm ready to pull the trigger as soon as the annoyance becomes too... not-worth-it... to remain here.

It's the small things that add up to become big things.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

I was doing that manually, so that I could control things rather finely and so I could preserve some comments (by pulling them into the duplicated post), but there are automated tools that will copy only the journal-to-journal. The limitation is that they only copy the entry itself, and I don't know if they manage to duplicate security settings and icon choices and such. Doing a search, ljmigrate (http://antennapedia.livejournal.com/266462.html) looks like it might be something to consider. And it's in python (rather than perl) so there's a fighting chance of decoding it and maybe making improvements.

LJ's current work-around for the tags is to hard limit them to 1000 per account. A quick-fix bit of hackery rather than fixing tag handling properly. There was no indication that it was temporary and that there would, eventually, be a proper fix put in place. Besides being quick-fix, it has the problem, as currently implemented, that only indication of the limit is when you hit the wall. There's no simple meter (e.g. Tags: 127 used of 1000 available) to indicate that one has plenty of room or almost none. Actually, there's no complex meter either, just the wall.

[doodlesthegreat.livejournal.com]

Once again, Six Apart demonstrates the ability to pull defeat from the jaws of victory.