Lotripper

They really did plan it this time. Should be up around two hours from now (now being 9 PM PST / 5 AM GMT)

Just in case you didn't see the LJ reminder: LJ will be down for maintenance, they say for four hours only.

03:30 UTC - 07:30 (on Thursday) Coordinated Universal Time / GMT / British Standard Time

Melbourne Australia time: Thursday 2:30 PM - 6:30 PM

Eastern Daylight Time: Wednesday 11:30 PM - Thursday 3:30 AM

Pacific Daylight Time: Wednesday, 8:30 PM - Thursday 12:30 AM

By the way, the US changes from Daylight Savings Time on the first Sunday in November, aka this Sunday, the 2nd

If you need another time zone, use very helpful time converter at timeanddate.com, set to the start of downtime

argh I think I have food poisoning :-(

ETA: I did not mean the pun with my Mood of 'listless'. On the other hand, it's a really good pun

LJ management is offering to restart Basic Accounts. But they want people to see the ads (particularly annoying for communities). And I'm pretty sure will apply to all Basic accounts, even ones that were made before the changeover. their "proposals":.

Proposal 1: Advertising would be displayed to visitors who are not logged in to LiveJournal at the time when they are looking at Basic Account journals and communities.

Proposal 2: Advertising would be displayed to logged-in Basic Account users when viewing application pages - pages which are not part of a community, a user's journal, profile or friends page (e.g. Update page, Edit Entries page, Manage Tags page).

Proposal 3a: Advertising would be shown to logged-in Basic Account users when viewing a journal which they have not friended or community they are not watching (e.g. if you friend a Basic journal, you do not see advertising; mutual friending is not required to avoid advertising).

Proposal 3b: Advertising would be shown to logged-in Basic Account users when viewing a journal of which they are not a mutual friend or a community of which they are not a member (e.g. if you friend a journal and they do not friend you, or if you watch a community but are not a member, you will see advertising; if you do become mutual friends or a member of a community, then you will no longer see advertising in that journal or community).

Thrilling.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, (attributed to Ben Franklin, Albert Einstein and lots of other people). Is the insane one LJ continuing to screw up, or us continuing to give them money?

LJ staff posted a fauxpology today. It said nearly nothing, and was not exactly reassuring. Is good that they've noticed we're upset. But getting the "right tone when communicating" is not nearly as important as NOT DOING STUPID STUFF. (Kudos to j_crew_guy for the term "fauxpology". )

Joke's on us, they posted at 8pm (Pacific Daylight Time) -- and no staff has even tried to answer comments.

stewardess has summarized LiveJournal's greatest customer service disasters, going back to April 2005, in Nostalgia: 6A/SUP's Greatest Fuck-Ups.

So far, the no_lj_ads community has found three LJ Advisory Board members who say they were not formally asked for advice, and when the topic of killing Basic accounts was mentioned in passing, they said it was a dumb idea. They are: Brad Fitzpatrick, Esther Dyson and danah boyd,

Here's the best (or at least the snarkiest) response yet to the killing off of Basic account creation, (found via princessofg ).

More tomorrow, including my thinky thoughts about the LJ business model.

As of NOW: Basic Account is an option available to accounts which were created before March 12, 2008. No account created after this date can be turned into a Basic Account. Basic Accounts will not have any advertising displayed on their accounts, but will have fewer benefits and features.

The official statement is buried at: FAQ #38 Did they announce this in news? lj_2008? lj_releases? Nooooo they did not. This was discovered by the folks at no_lj_ads!

And "Jason Shellen, VP of Product Development for LiveJournal" says it was to make the registration process "easier for new users to understand" To which I say, Apparently they think their users are STUPID. The new ones for needing it "easier" and the old ones for taking that crap.

ETA: No one asked Brad. And he's on the LJ Advisory Board -- that was the whole point of the advisory board!

I've been collecting journaling and social networking and migration articles from metafandom and other places. So here's a giant post with perhaps too much food for thought.

• A good summary of LJ management asshattry
  
  
• LJ is planning to mark journals and communities as "adult". It's not so much a problem to me that kids can't see smut (kids with half a brain can lie, says the mom). It's that anything protected from children is also protected from the general public. So anyone curious has to at probably get an LJ and get age-certified somehow, and possibly join the community to see the stories. Definitely a chilling effect.
  
  
• The Omniture tracking stats thing turns out to be not that big a deal, according to die-hard LJ critic stewardess.
  
  
• 10 Ways Flickr Builds Communities (from Business Week of all places, via bokardo)
  1. Engage
     Don’t just listen to your community. Engage
  2. Enforce
     Let the community help set standards and policies for appropriate behavior --then enforce them
  3. Take Responsibility
     Fess up immediately when you make mistakes
  4. Step Back
     Don’t be afraid to step back and let your customers take over
  5. Give Freely
     Never underestimate the allure of a free T-shirt (or sticker, or button…)
  6. Be Patient
     Take knee-jerk reactions with a grain of salt
  7. Hire Fans
     Make sure your employees are as passionate about your product as your community’s most die-hard fans
  8. Stay Calm
     Develop a thick skin
  9. Focus
     Be flexible but don’t lose sight of your priorities
  10. Be Visible
      stay human
  
  SOMEONE SEND THIS TO 6A!

( more about RSS readers, social networking, blogging in public and non-journal fandom sites )

perseph2hades has a post that nails the LJ debacle. Read that now, I'll wait.

My opinion is that LJ management apparently has complete fluff-for-brains and a sincere desire eject child pornography, but are not able to tell the difference between photographs of harm being done to children and drawings of fictional characters of indeterminate age.

It's all very well and good when they apologize, but then they give artists one "strike" for pictures that have been annotated with ages above 18 and/or deleted from their scrapbook but retained in the system cache!

They're going far beyond even the Bush administration, how about that? From the New York Times (reg. required): Federal Effort on Web Obscenity Shows Few Results: In the last few years, 67,000 citizens’ complaints have been deemed legitimate under the program and passed on to the Justice Department and federal prosecutors. The number of prosecutions resulting from those referrals is zero.

So much for legal obligations of LJ, because we know there's really gross stuff out there. Including videos of people being beheaded. Drawings of clearly consensual sex including fictional teenagers are not exactly a threat to anyone.

Given that LJ has screwed this up, over and over, I wonder what else they're going to do? I'm slowly reducing my dependence on LJ, crossposting to IJ, GJ, and JF and reading in that order. I have a reading filter on LJ and will be commenting on other journal systems first. It's not much, but it's something I can and will do.

Brad Fitzpatrick (LJ's founder and original developer) is leaving LJ. Brad confirms this. Fans yearn for the good old days when he was in charge.

Then he posts that in 30 seconds, LJ management told Brad: it's all child porn and he believes them. (I have several screenshots of this).

I don't know whether to be relieved that they think they really are going after child porn (and are therefore sincere) or appalled that they can't tell the difference between child porn erotic art, (and are therefore stupid). Sincere but stupid is the kindest interpretation of all their actions.

( meme: my crime is posting all that damn porn! )

ETA: LJ is sending out standardized email answers to people who sent them angry messages, saying there will be a post on the lj_biz community tonight.

(crossposted to LJ, GJ, IJ and JF)