This comment in the most recent post in lj_policy may be right on the money. If these censorship maneuvers by LiveJournal have been in response to behind the scenes legal action against them, then their lack of communication with users makes sense. If this is the case, it is likely going to effect any site that gains sufficient notoriety. A lot of these alternative sites may be able to get away with looser restrictions only because they're still flying under the radar screen.

Following the leak of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I'm going to start my off-line time today. I have a lot to do in preparing for invalid_userid's visit anyway, so I shouldn't be spending much time online anyway.

I should note that while I won't be reading anything from online for the next few days (email, comments (due to possible trolls), wikipedia, or my friends list), I may still post using Semagic does not risk seeing spoilers. I guess "very limited internet use" is more accurate than "off-line".

Ask me anything. Anything. I will then make a post answering any and all the questions asked. I will not state who asked the questions, nor will I post what the questions were. However, you may put a number in the subject line of your comment. If you do so, I will put that number in front of my answer to your question so that you can identify which answer is for you.

Replies to this post are screened.

I just received a anonymous spam comment in this journal with a link to a page on Blogger (a.k.a. Blogspot, owned by Google). LiveJournal generally does a good job at weeding out spam, but blogger's recent "improvements" appear as if they're aimed at aiding spamblogs. They've removed the "flag as objectionable" feature from the blog pages so that there is now clearcut and intuitive way to call out spam. I wonder if Blogger/Google simply see no motivation to fight the spamblogs. A large percentage of the Blogger spamblogs use Google Adsense and all of them pull traffic into Blogger, so Google actually makes money on them.

However, I suspect Google's effective spam-tolerance may capsize them in the end. The Google search engine, and especially their blogsearch, is rapidly sinking into a bog of junk and spam. The Search Wikia project, due to launch this year, could start seriously nibbling at Google's marketshare by providing a less spam-ridden alternative. That not only translates to less traffic at google.com, but less traffic for the multitude of adsense-using spamsites and spamblogs as well. If Google doesn't get serious about fighting spam soon, it could be their undoing.

Blogger (a.k.a. blogspot.com) is becoming more and more about spamblogs now. The proportion of actual blogs there has been decreasing steadily. I've got one copying this LiveJournal, and I've seen great many of my friends mention their blogs are copied too. Spamblogs started as blogs that would randomly take text segments from a number of journals, but now they simply copy whole blogs. Blogger is so completely unmotivated to discourage spamblogging it seems as if they actually like hosting them for the extra clicks they bring in.

I'm used to what I type being cached at various sites on the net, so the fact that there is an extra copy does not bother me in and of itself. What bothers me is that it muddies the search result, especially for people looking for content specifically related to me and what I write about. The spam blogs are not tagged and comments won't be responded to. They provide an inferior detour from the blog they copy at the expense of both the blogger and the reader.

I don't really use my MySpace account, but I seem to get plenty of spam there. Livejournal does a very good job at policing spam, it is very rare that I get any spam comments here. I used to run a couple communities that were prone to spam, but moderating membership pretty much ended that. But, on MySpace simply having a profile seems enough to get spammed on a regular basis. What is more, you have to go to the site and log in to even see the spam. MySpace will not email the text of the messages to you. I've gone ahead an disabled emails from MySpace, and therefore will not see any actual comments or people attempting to add me until I deign to go to the site and check.

I'm enabling anonymous commenting in my journal. I'm going to be extending the policy I stated here to anonymous comments:

Anonymous comments will be screened. I will not unscreen or respond to any troll comments, I will simply delete them.

I have found that when given absolutely no feedback, trolls generally move on to find more interactive game.

Will LiveJournal ever get the comment emails working reliably again? Sure, there have been occasional problems in the past, but they were usually rectified in a day or two. The comment emails haven't been working reliably for about a month now. What gives?

I have successfully given away all communities I was running with the exception of house_of_clocks, which at this point is of minimal utility and may itself be on the chopping block in the near future. I have also left all communities I was a member of, again with the exception of house_of_clocks. I may join or rejoin some communities at a slow pace, most likely for the purposes of posting creative works. I am going to enable comments on posts after this one, and I'll probably go back and retroactively enabling them on my Learning Curve post.

I will be reading a very small portion of my friends list for the immediate future, and will likely expand as I feel more comfortable with the LiveJournal environment again. I just want to take this slow, as I'm still feeling quite burned. I was too emotionally involved in this place, and now I am coming to it from a different place. I enjoy writing, and interacting with other users. But I need to keep a distance mentally that I had not before. What my new baseline activity level will be, I don't know. We will see as it evolves.

While LiveJournal has been a good experience in many ways, lately it has just become just an added stress in my life. If there is anything I don't need right now, it's more stress. I was going to leave LiveJournal entirely. Maybe setting up my own blog on my website. I still want to post. I still want to write. I just don't want to deal with interacting with an online community right now.

I have, however, decided that instead of leaving LiveJournal entirely, I will stop, at least for the time being and possibly indefinitely, interacting with other members. I will be disabling comments on all my posts and will reading my friends list sporadically, if at all. I still have six left communities to find maintainers for, and I will be doing that as soon as possible. I have already given more than half of my communities over to others and it feels already as if a great weight has been lifted from my shoulders.

Right now I need distance. I need to be in my own space to deal with my own problems. If you view interaction as the essential part of being on my friends list and do not wish to remain, you are welcome to unfriend me. I will not take offence, in fact I will be surprised if nobody does.

I thought they were going to have this thing fixed by now, but LiveJournal is still eating well over half of my comment emails. It's not that big of a deal in my own journal, because I can check for comments on the recent comments page or in the portal. However, comments I get to my posts in communities as well as replies to comments I make in other journals do not show up there. It's very strong annoying.

I posted this meme a little over a year ago. The program has been improved to allow you to exclude your own and anonymous comments from the result, which I have done. Here are the results:

Top Commenters on neitherday's LiveJournal
(Self and anonymous comments excluded from rankings)

	Top 10
1	purpleglitter	185
2	strangedoll	185
3	biker_boi_dhane	181
4	lady_babalon	167
5	circebe	160
6	dykestar	130
7	borggrrl	128
8	ruakh	107
9	lusciousdame	106
10	azurelunatic	101
	( 11-100 )

Total Commenters: 968 (868 not shown)
Total Comments: 10399
Report generated 8/10/2005 2:57:33 PM by scrapdog's LJ Comment Stats Wizard 1.6

Welcome trolls. All comments from non-friends will be automatically screened from this point on. I will not be unscreening or responding to any future troll comments, I will simply be deleting them. That is all.

I'm going to be in the St. Louis area from the 17^th to the 24^th of next month. If anyone in the area wants to meet up you can comment here. However, I may or may not have a driver's license at that point, so the ride situation may be a bit iffy.

I'm thinking of switching to S2. A couple things keep me from making the switch.

First, I haven't really seen any S2 comments page layouts that are better than the S1 comments page layout. S1's comment page is a bastion of simplicity and functionality.

Second, I'd want switching to result in a better layout, which means putting time and effort into learning S2.

The only feature that I really want in my journal that is offered in S2 is the ability to put the correct userpic next to each entry in the recent view. I don't know if it's really worth it. If someone would make me an S2 style that I really liked, I might use it. But, I'm afraid I'm really picky. There's a good chance I'll reject whatever the person came up with, and that might result in hurt feelings. I'm especially picky about the comments page. Without a comments page layout as good or better than S1, I just don't want S2.

Poll #312943
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Do you read your friends list less when LiveJournal is running slow?

Do you post less when LiveJournal is running slow?

Do you comment less when LiveJournal is running slow?

Someone left a really good, long, well thought out comment in my journal. She, however, double posted it. I deleted the extra copy. Unfortunately, she deleted the other copy at the same time I deleted the extra one. So, now they're both gone. Just another one of the million and one ways LiveJournal has been annoying lately.

LiveJournal acting up. Yeah, so what else is new. I'm getting comment emails for comments that aren't showing up when I go to my journal. If it was just one, I'd assume the person changed their mind and deleted the comments, but this has happened several times today with different users. Very annoying.

I haven't been receiving the notification emails for some of the comments I've received. I don't know if it is a problem with LiveJournal or my email. Whatever it is, it's annoying. I'm worried that there are comments I've missed seeing. I hope it's a temporary LJ problem, because if it's a problem with my email, that means I've probably been missing other emails as well.