Current mood:	confused
Entry tags:	fandom, lj, rants

You people are sometimes insane.
1) LJ's utter chasm of SUCK in the past two days is almost surely related to the recent DDoS attack and measures taken to make sure that you can keep reaching your LJs while zombiebots get turned away before they reach us.

2) If there is a Secret Conspiracy of the Mundane Powers that Be to kick fen with controversial, your-kink-is-not-mine interests like chan, wincest, malfoycest, and underage off LiveJournal, then I have not heard about it and, more tellingly, my contacts on the Abuse team laughed their asses off when I mentioned it in front of them.

3) If this were a legitimate rumor, I'd think it would have a slightly greater edge of hysteria in the wording as well as the content, and more outrage that LJ was in danger of caving to public pressure, rather than a call to duck and hide.

4) I haven't heard about it, and my query to IRC was how the usual suspects in the admins found out about it. One of my friends gave me a heads-up on the rumor, asking me if I knew anything about it, and could I check. I didn't know anything about it. They didn't know anything about it. This is the sort of thing that I would be hearing about from the more fan-involved members of the volunteer crew; there are at least two senior volunteers that I know of who have significant involvement in fandom. If this were legit, they would have found out about it perhaps five minutes after the drama started, and we would have heard about it slightly after that. If someone were risking her job, she'd have posted a locked duck-and-cover post, with all the detail she could give. It is a major holiday weekend starting up, but something like that would have defied physics and posted itself five minutes before the first actual sign of real trouble. Rumors like that spread that fast because content like that spreads.

The rumor itself:

LJ is being pressured to purge right now. This isn't LJ's fault, so please don't stand up and beat your breast against them.

Because of the recent FanLib thing and the wank over the MJ figurine, fandom is in a pretty bright public spotlight right now, and it's not that great for us.

Outside forces are pressuring LJ to delete journals and ban users. It's been going on for about 12 hours now. It is FANNISH people who are under the microscope.

If you have the words 'rape' 'rapefic' 'incest' or 'underage' in your LJ interests and are able to do so, EDIT YOUR USERINFO to remove them. Any variations of these should be removed, too. If I were you, I'd get rid of anything like 'wincest' or 'malfoycest' or the like. Also 'chan' -- because as soon as these mainstream folks figure out what 'chan' is, they're gonna come down on us.

If you have underage or 'cest fic posted public in your journal, I'd lock it. (this is my Yin's personal recommendation and not that of anyone 'official') Any squeeing over 'cest fics or fic with any underage characters should be kept behind a lock, too.

This is not going to be a long-term thing. A little hiding and editing of our interests while the black cloud passes over, and we should be fine.

If you want, this can be reposted in your journals, but PLEASE filter out RL people and folks who will make a public stink about it. Someone risked their job to let the LJ fen know what was going on, and we want to keep the fact that we have this info as quiet as possible.

The LJ outages today almost certainly are because of this. It is NOT LJ's fault -- LJ has almost always been welcoming and wonderful to LJ fandom. Please be sure to emphasize this if you pass it on. If you know any names of who knew what or who leaked what, KEEP THEM TO YOURSELF.