All opinions expressed in this LJ are mine, unless otherwise indicated. They are certainly not those of my employer(s). They are also not the opinions of LiveJournal; I just volunteer here.

LJ notifications are currently down. http://community.livejournal.com/lj_maintenance/126582.html

Status (http://status.livejournal.org) says that the notifications are being cached to be sent later.

I got some DW comments that I don't have notifications for either.

Hang tight, be chill, and all that good stuff. I am perhaps hopelessly behind on my LJ friends page, though I'm trying to at least read the Support-related stuff. Please let me know if anything earth-shattering happened and you're not on my DW reading list (because that's smaller and I did get caught up on that).

(The Support-related stuff I'm reading is my Support filter, so if you see occasional entries marked "# = spr0t" then I've probably caught up on most of your recent exploits.)

Crossposted. comments.

I know a number of people, myself included, are none too thrilled with the proposed new format for news. I know news-commenters can be an exceptionally conservative bunch about some things, and it does not befit me as a volunteer and a gentleman to blow off too much steam in public about that.

However, after reading the news post more closely, and the company of others doing the same, it came to my attention, and the attention of others, that the compiled top 10 quotes from the Writer's Block appear to be posted without the knowledge or consent of the people being quoted, and (in the absence of their knowledge or consent) also without attribution.

I am actually not okay with this, and it surprises me to realize how intense my reaction is. Granted, they were assuredly all public entries, and the code for the the Writer's Block aggregator looks as if it respects the appropriate site privacy settings.

I can understand the impulse to not link back to the original entry, and why it would be counted as a point in the favor of the author of these news entries. Having a rush of unexpected visitors from news might be comparable to having a rush of visitors from, say, metaquotes or metafandom or perhaps even fandom_wank. Even if you're willing to welcome the attention, you want to be prepared. However, when I was recently plagiarized by the now-suspended-by-their-service-provider (shout-out to my peeps at GoDaddy, 3rd shift web board represent!) paganjournals.net, the thing that angered me most was not that they were using my content in service of their profit, but that there was no link back to me, so if someone stumbled across it and wanted to engage with the author, they actually were unable to unless they did some Google-digging.

The original entry for quoted selections can still be found by manually going through the Writer's Block answer listing for that question -- or taking a reasonably unique phrase from the quote and putting it into the shiny new LiveJournal search engine. This is enough of a barrier to discovery that if someone in news likes the cut of a featured individual's jib and wishes to subscribe to their newsletter, they're going to have to work to make this happen. On the other hand, if someone else in news decides to take offense and track down the original entry, it's not going to be overly difficult for them.

Either way, the question of whether or not to link back could have been avoided with permission from the original poster or, at the very least, notification.


I rarely feel moved to make an official complaint about a LiveJournal practice through official channels. Most of the time, I feel that I am able to express any reservations I have through entries in my own journal, comments to an official entry relevant to the topic, and chatter in volunteer areas. This time, I was moved to give feedback through the official feedback form. I'm not calling for a write-in campaign. Those generate ill-will and put the burden upon people who often had nothing to do with the original offense and who are not in a position themselves to change policies. I say this to illustrate how deeply troubled I feel.


I'm actually not sure what the exact mechanism is for an entry to appear in the list of Writer's Block entries, aside from the entry having been posted with a Writer's Block module inside, the entry being public at the time the listing page was built, and the journal eligible to appear in latest results and "verticals" around the site. Despite code-diving, I am not sure whether removing the Writer's Block module from the entry will in fact remove the entry from the listing. (Locking it will prevent it from being displayed. If you're paranoid, do go ahead and lock them.) From the looks of things, it would appear that only entries to the newest questions are being quoted in news, and selected by a person (with a sense of humor) rather than being picked in some automatic way.

In any case, I am not okay with this practice. I had been meaning to edit the Writer's Block entries in my own journal so they'd be readable when archived for quite some time, and this provided the necessary impetus.

( Scraping out and replacing: the fun way! )

Crossposted. comments.

Source of the missing comment problem found: Memcache issues.

When two database servers are very, very busy, sometimes one doesn't talk to the other one. And sometimes, the other one has no idea that someone left a comment just five minutes ago.

It's not the same comment rot as IJ had, which is a relief.

For those following along with who does what at LJ, please note the announcement in lj_support: http://community.livejournal.com/lj_support/795054.html

To the great grief of I think most of the support volunteer community, tupshin no longer works for LiveJournal.

Crossposted. comments.

If you were among the cluster of people who got something that looked like an LJ news announcement, except for tupshin, not to worry -- it's not a security problem or anything interesting other than a test (of a new news-notification script, it looks like), that did not do what it ought to do, and stopped after about a minute of running amok.

Tupshin is a US-based LJ manager on the geek side of things, whose hobbies include motorcycles, teasing gorman, and saying "NO!" a lot.

Crossposted. comments.

My schedule is out of wack again. I am displeased.

Went for a walk with my aunt yesterday, down on Rockaway Beach and its environs. Mostly its environs. As I was gathering myself together to head out the door, and waiting for my aunt's call so I wouldn't be standing out there too long, tiferet called, advising me about a computer tool run with teshiron and jd. However, I was already on my way out, so I advised that yes, I could in fact look up bus schedules from home at need. Then my aunt called, and soon we were on our way.

My aunt had forgotten the purple harness for the poodle, so his leash was clipped to his jaguar-spotted collar. (He is a remarkably sensible dog despite the poncy collar.)

The poodle does not hump indiscriminately, for the record. He humps Deacon. Deacon tries to hump him, but is even less allowed to, as he is getting to be a creaky old dog, and ought not to either hump or be humped. ( NSF EV ) The poodle does not hump other dogs (often), or objects, or people. Just (mostly) Deacon. (There was no humping on this trip.)

The fog was in thick enough that we could just barely see the waves breaking and the rocks surrounding the beach, and one intrepid surfer out in the ocean, the torso of a dark-wetsuited ghost in the fog.

( Read more... )

On the way back, my phone rang again, with intelligence that there was now an IHOP run. I collected myself at home, confirmed the location, and set out, dismissing the message from the Whispering that bringing my netbook would be a good plan. I arrived first; the rest of the party walked up somewhat damp but triumphant after a Krispy Kreme stop. Genial activities continued to commence within iHop, with much accent-geeking and chatter about regional variations, and also discussion about people on Twitter who introduce themselves via gay porn. (Not that gay porn is a bad thing, but it makes a singular first impression. "Hi my good sir; would you care to try some porn today?" I suppose face to face they call this cruising?)

Post-dinner, entertainments in the form of a lot of screwing commenced at the Teshypants/JD household. Specifically, JD's macbook is not charging, although it still takes mains power. This is a source of much fucking frustration, and taking apart a fucking macbook is not recommended for the amateur. (JD relates from the "geniuses" that in fact some of the screws are decorative, and they're all different lengths.) (Oh hey, JD, if you had florist foam on hand, paper with drawn diagram, on top of the foam, push the screws in so they stay.) Having ignored the Whispering, I was without my netbook, but this crowd is always good for entertaining discourse. There are plans involving a Greek food festival and Folsom Street Fair, and possibly also RHPS.

The final screw proved difficult. It was tiny, in a poor location without enough room to put the big screwdriver in it straight, the little screwdriver that was potentially its size was bent and did not work in it, and all four of us tried with a succession of different screwdrivers and tips, with increasing lack of luck. I eventually took the pliers to the bent screwdriver and bent it further, so its handle was at a 90° angle from the tip, to provide leverage, but still no luck. Universally, either we could not get a grasp on the head with the driver, the driver was the wrong size, or we were not able to get it to turn when we did. tiferet had some screwdrivers of better size, and it was proceeding in a bedtime-like direction in any case.

JD accompanied us, and ran in with her for the screwdrivers (and also, as it transpired, to be the Tall One swapping out a lightbulb). I dropped him back off and went home.

Upon connecting to the internet again, I discovered that LJ had exploded due to an exploit of scripting in Flash, and Flash content was at that time temporarily disabled, and there was a whole lot of security-minded IRC chatter. There is a news post up. It looks to have been an email address harvester with a side effect of UNLOCKING RECENT/TOP ENTRIES, presumably to make it spread more easily. The security flaw has been patched, but if you are in the habit of making locked posts and were reading LJ yesterday, please check the news post and your recent posts to make sure you're OK.

Tonight looks like Borderlands. :D :D :D

Crossposted. comments.

Some rogue embed decided to self-replicate itself across LJ by editing people's entries upon them viewing the malicious embed and not having those scripts being blocked.

You may know the beast by finding embeds in your recent entries that you did not put there, and how the entry is unlocked. If you post locked stuff, check your journals -- I'd rather you be safe than sorry.

Quick official announcement, details to come

More detailed unofficial rundown

Edit: news post with full rundown: http://news.livejournal.com/117957.html

Crossposted. comments.

Gearman and TheSchwartz are two job scheduling engines that LiveJournal and Dreamwidth and everything on the whole collected codebase use, for different tasks as appropriate.


xb95 that could work. and ofc, now I'm wondering if we can't just use theschwartz workesr instead of gearman workers.
xb95 then it's just one level of abstraction
durandal goes to look things up
goesboom bliiiiink.
goesboom (Jazz) Someone someday want to explain things to me as far as this goes?
( Someday is today. )


And that concludes this episode of xb95 and exor674 Explain It All!

If you're not watching paidmembers, there's an offer for an extension of paid time because of not being able to get to the site during the attacks. Go, clicky linky.

So in many forums it is possible to bring a topic back up to the top of whatever board by commenting to it, or resetting the date. Despite some misconceptions, this is actually not an option for most areas of LiveJournal/other sites running the LiveJournal code.

For most cases where one might "bump" a post in a bulletin board, the answer on LiveJournal is to make a new post, possibly one pointing back to the old one to revive discussion, or bringing the same topic from the old post up in a new post (sometimes linking back to the old one too.) Occasionally the answer is to leave a reply, or contact the original poster privately.

Let's examine some of the ways that people who are used to a bulletin board environment attempt to do things, and how and why they don't work.


Commenting.

( Unlike a traditional bulletin board, commenting on an entry does not make that entry float to the top of the topics list. However, some (but not all) people will get notified. )

If you are thinking of attempting to "bump" by leaving a comment, consider the effect you want to have.

( Read more... )


Editing a Post.

Editing the text of a post only changes the text of the post. It does not otherwise notify anyone of anything. People who visit your journal or the community directly may see the edit if they're looking for it; people whose friends pages have not filled up past your entry may see the edit if they refresh the page; people who come back in response to comments may see the edit if they look through the original entry; people who come back just to look at the post and comments again may see the edit. It does not bump the entry's position on a friends page or send a notification to anyone.


Editing a Comment.

When you edit a comment, anyone who would have received a notification about the comment in the first place will get a notification that you have edited it. If you know you will be making several changes to a comment, you may wish to save them for one edit, rather than making several smaller edits.

However, once a comment has a reply, it can no longer be edited. Only paid accounts may edit their comments.


Changing the Date in a Community.

Editing an entry in a community to change the date will change where in the community's calendar/archive page the entry appears, but will not affect the entry's position on the friends page of community readers or in the main view of the community.


Changing the Date in Your Journal.

( Editing an entry in your own journal to change its date will not change where it appears on the friends page of your readers.  )


Changing Post Security Significantly After Posting.

Posting something with a strong level of security and then editing it to a less restrictive setting will not change the entry's placement on the friends pages of your readers either. If you post an entry and edit its security within a few minutes of posting, your readers are likely to see it on their friends page unless their friends page is very busy indeed. If you edit its security a few days later, your friends may not see it unless they go all the way back to that day for some reason, or else visit your journal directly.

I left some fic open for too long and got an "Invalid Form Submission" error when I tried to post a comment last night. I'm used to that error. If I'm lucky, Firefox will have saved the comment. If I'm not lucky, it won't have. Either way, I'm used to hitting the back button, copying my comment if I'd not lost it, refreshing the page, then commenting again.

I'm usually pretty good about remembering how long I've had any given tab open, give or take a few days, so I usually don't ram into this too often. I can go a few weeks, in fact.

Last night, I prepared a comment, hit the submit button, then cringed at the sight of the familiar pa... wait.

Invalid form submission. You may have left the reply form open too long, or logged out since you opened the page. Please try posting again.

My comment was helpfully included in a box below the error message. The familiar, beloved error message from dear afuna's patch for Dreamwidth. It had been pulled upstream and quietly implemented.

I burst out in tears of sheer happiness. This. This is how it works.

Disclosures: I volunteer for both LiveJournal and Dreamwidth; I keep my journal on both LiveJournal and Dreamwidth, largely mirrored, with occasional posts to InsaneJournal. I condense the ephemera of my impressions into generalizations; if I am lucky, I can remember where I was to have gotten that impression.


I think Dreamwidth has helped save LiveJournal.

No, really; I think that LiveJournal is in a much better place right now than it was six months ago. It may even be in a better place than it was a year ago. I'm feeling more general enthusiasm and hope than I was then, and most especially, I'm no longer experiencing the quickly-repressed desire to pack up my journal and flee into the night (with the exception of my Suggestions duties, as I wouldn't leave Carrie in the lurch like that, as my shoes would be hard to fill).

I haven't been paying steady or close attention to news comments for a while, not since the level of animosity against SUP, LiveJournal in general, and some actual personal friends reached full shriek. I had better things to do, like kiss a facehugger. I have checked back intermittently, and I have noticed a change in the last two months. It seems to me that the people who had been speaking out with the most anger and betrayal about LiveJournal's decisions have finished migrating off the service.

I just didn't see that same level of pain and outrage the last time I looked. Annoyance? Oh, yes, plenty. A la carte userpics were promised, but there hasn't been much of an update on the progress there. "My Guests"? Oh, yes, that's getting the classic debate, where people who will opt out and never use it complain about its very existence, and people wonder who would use it and why it was even implemented (it's a frequent request in suggestions, for the record). But the anguish has dramatically lowered.

The launch of Dreamwidth has played a role in that drop-off in a way that no other alternate journal service has. I did not see the same level of drop-off in user anguish with the large migrations to GreatestJournal and InsaneJournal -- indeed, if anything, there was just an additional element to some of the complaints.

( GreatestJournal, InsaneJournal, Dreamwidth, ease of migration, backups, Open Source, antagonistic users vs customer service, and my observations. )

And no longer embattled with the same factions of the userbase, LiveJournal responds, with further attention to detail in new feature rollouts, and a high level of responsiveness to beta feedback. LiveJournal is changing. LiveJournal is up and running and starting to actively develop instead of just treading water. I can taste the way the development team is providing output as a fully operational team once more when I look at lj_releases. Stuff from suggestions is bubbling through. Releases seem to be happening more smoothly. Promising new volunteers are starting to pop back in. Code patches shuffle back and forth, today Dreamwidth picking up a new feature from LiveJournal, tomorrow LiveJournal snagging a bug fix from Dreamwidth.

The project rolls on, and the userbases of all LiveJournal-based sites are the more secure for having more talent devoted to the project, and another viable option.


Cross-site chatter: Dreamwidth, LiveJournal

OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE OMG OMG OMG <3 <3 <3

*hugs a very surprised Tupshin, Marta, Henry, Carrie, and several other people*

LiveJournal now features pingbacks for all users, not just paid users. Pingback settings can be managed from the Privacy settings tab. It defaults to off, I believe, so if you haven't set it, you won't be surprised. You can also override pingback settings on a post by post basis, if you feel like being more public or more stealth than usual.


How it works:

A pingback is sort of like a trackback, except automatic. (Okay, 80% of the audience just had their eyes glaze over.)

Pingbacks are based on the concept that if you link to someone else's entry in public (or if they link to yours), you'd want to let them know, and you'd want to know if someone else is talking about your entry. Even better, you want to leave a link to your post on their post to maybe get some of their readers over on your entry.

So you make a public post and you have pingbacks turned on (for your whole journal, or just that post). It has a link to somebody else's post. "Oho! A link!" LJ says, upon you posting it. "I wonder what's at the other end of that shiny little link?"

LJ then pokes the link with a stick to see if the other end of the link does the pingback thing. (If it's on LJ, it's easy to tell. If it's off LJ, LJ sends out a "Hey, y'all do pingbacks? If so, here you go!" request, and hopes for the best. Evidently it's only on-LJ now. They changed it while I wasn't looking!)

If the other site doesn't do pingbacks, LJ shrugs its shoulders and soldiers on. If it does, the other site goes, "Hey, thanks! ...uh, just to be sure, you really do have a link to me, right?" and prods your entry to make sure that you've got a legit link to them and aren't likely to be a spammer just saying you have a pingback.

Assuming all is good, the other site lets the blog owner know that hey! They have someone linking to them! OMG! and in short order, a little blurb saying something like "Some random guy at a blog you've never heard of linked to you! '...and in other news, I found a cool link: [link goes here] and zomg, what, and also ...'" shows up.

In turn, when someone else links to you (and you both have pingbacks turned on), a screened comment from pingback_bot shows up on your entry.


I recommend you turn this on if: you're participating in a large, wide-ranging discussion, and/or you wouldn't mind if the original poster and/or all their commenters followed the link back to chat with you in your post.

I recommend you turn this off if: you're making a catty public post, or any other situation where you would not want the original poster and/or all their commenters to join in or necessarily even know that the post exists.

It doesn't matter if: your post is not public -- pingbacks are off for all locked posts.


This post is brought to you by another round of multifannish discussion and friendly commenters coming in and mentioning where they're being linked from, and a general lack of pingbacks from the places that are linking. (Except you, 'song.)

So the user has a profile, and the comm has a profile, and this is a completely out of left field and wild idea that is technically a bit unlikely, so bear with me.

You can see the comms that the user is a member of on the profile. (Mostly.) You can see the users that a comm is a member of. Sometimes a user has specialty interests and bio that they want to show to other comm members but don't necessarily think is worth/for public consumption of their regular profile.

Like, where I intersect with Vorkosigan comms, I want to list that I was a member of the List since 1997 or thereabouts, maybe 1996, and that I sorta drifted away but I'm still reading and happy and alive and all. And all sorts of fannish details that aren't relevant to the main part of my life as expressed on LJ.

It would be so damn nifty (and such a fucking pain for the user to keep updated, and such a fucking technical pain probably) to be able to enter a separate bio and interests for each place I intersect a community.

I don't know if I would want the bio/interests visible to non-members (and here we run into security issues, because if it's an open comm, well...) (but then some open comms ask for member introductions, and yes you have to search for them but) but again you could do the link-to-locked-entry (or in this case members-only entry) dodge if it's public.

And it would be simply ace to be able to do interests searches and search from the interests of either/both the general public, and the community-specific interests of people in the same communities as you. You already have at least one point of contact.


OK, people, tear it to shreds. I want it plausible.

I got off to a late start, but I did get launched, and opted to skip some of the optional steps I'd thought of. JD had been running a fever, and therefore declined anything like a rally or vigil.

I brought along both laptops (the old creaky full-size laptop Thalia, and the netbook Disaster Area) though I only wound up using Thalia.

I called MissKat partway there, and we chatted cheerfully until she had to go see to her lobsters.

It was good to see JD and Ryan. I got there just as they were ready to put the cookie dough in the oven, and I snagged pictures of the process. ( Docadmin chicanery is a go. )

And we weren't even drinking.

[15:24] rahaeli: go to the notifications page
[15:24] rahaeli: uncheck both "comments in my journal" and "replies to my comments"
[15:24] rahaeli: save
[15:24] rahaeli: check ONLY "replies to my comments"
[15:24] rahaeli: save
[15:24] rahaeli: both will then be checked
[15:25] rahaeli: but you should only get replies in email
[15:25] LivredOr: no, rah, I'm talking about LJ, not DW
[15:25] rahaeli: you'll have to do that every time you change a notification, but it should work on LJ too
[15:25] LivredOr: seriously? there's a fix for it?
[15:25] LivredOr: omg I love you even more than I already do for creating DW
[15:26] rahaeli: well, it's not so much a fix as a horrible hack
[15:26] rahaeli: but :)

So I've seen some people are wondering why the upsurge in bot users who don't do anything except post nonsensical entries with spam-links and add people as friends are a problem, if people don't add them back and they do not leave spam-comments in other people's journals. These are the reasons I've identified; there are probably more.

They annoy people, and they have no legitimate reason to be on LiveJournal; their presence is actively against the Terms of Service.
They're using LJ server resources for their own benefit to drive up search engine ratings, at LiveJournal's cost, taking away from the processor time and storage space that would be available to legitimate users, rather than using a domain and hosting they paid for.
They attempt to hoodwink LJ users into giving them money in some cases.
Some of them attempt to lure LJ users into visiting malware-ridden sites and converting LJ users into unwitting zombies in their botnets.
They're taking up namespace; most of the usernames are garble but not all of them.
They're taking up people's time, granted only a few seconds at a time, but these little things add up.
They're forcing LJ support to handle people complaining about them.
They're diverting developers' effort from things that are more useful to the userbase.
They're taking Abuse time and energy to research and suspend, which takes away from Abuse time and energy spent on other issues.
They make it damned hard to find any real human on http://www.livejournal.com/stats/latest.bml

They need to die with fire.

niqaeli reckoned that this was a good time to revive the Emergency Contact Information First Post meme, and tajasel has a nice static copy of the relevant information, updated for Dreamwidth; I've included the original information for LiveJournal below the cut.

If you've done this in the past, take the time to go back, take a look at the entry, and revise it if there are any changes. The basic meme as it stands only asks for your own personal basic information; I've chosen to include additional information that might be of interest to emergency medical types, including some medical history and contact information for individuals who are actually genetically related to me and local.

If you haven't done this, I recommend that you do. It's actually not all that uncommon for the closest friends of someone who blogs under a pseudonym to know a friend's username, phone number, given name, and deepest darkest secrets, but not exact physical address or family name, if those haven't been relevant for mailing care packages. iroshi has been close to me for almost as long as I've been on LJ, and has seen me at my absolute mental worst, and helped me pick up the broken pieces of my head and put them back together, and she still didn't know my family name when someone asked her about me. I hadn't thought these important enough to tell her, but these things can be relevant in the physical world.

( What's a contact post? )

Everybody's comfort level with this sort of thing varies, but if you are comfortable with this, and/or have listed your contact information in a filtered post for sharing with your friends, consider placing one at the beginning of your journal where it's easy to find.