Unpopular Fannish Opinion: LJLogin

LJ just had a release, and somewhere in the stuff that went on, some changes were made to LJ's login cookie such that LJLogin, the amazingly popular tool for, well, logging you in to LJ, broke.

(For those who are saying "Hey wait, why not log in using username and password like the rest of us?", you are probably not the target audience for LJLogin. The target audience is from what I gather mainly roleplayers, who can easily have dozens of accounts, any five or ten of which may be interacting with each other in comments, choosing a different icon for each comment, in near-real-time-IM speed. It's amazing what people can use LJ to do. The people who use LJ for this often have not just one but multiple paid accounts, because number of icons is very relevant to roleplayers.)

Deep in the comments of the most recent lj_releases entry, markf explained: "This is actually unrelated to the release, but we did make a minor change today in the way we handle cookies which has affected this plugin, and it will require the developer of the plugin to make some changes to it before it will work again. The changes made will make life significantly more difficult for automated spammers, and is something we intend to leave in place."

That, there, full stop, is why I am not going to start yelling about this. LJ has a spam problem. LJ has a major spam problem and I am pathetically grateful every time I see a report that there are changes that look to be effective in the fight. One of the major reasons I now prefer comments on Dreamwidth, and lock many entries on LiveJournal that are public elsewhere, is because of the spammers hiding in the cushions at LJ. Even knowing that this may cost LJ paying members, if this will address some of the spamming, I cannot fault them for rolling it out as fast as they could. (I do not know any of the other considerations, but faster is better when it comes to dealing with spammers.)

There is a completely hypothetical requirements-gathering session for an LJ-side login switcher. (I already checked and the previous (2010 and 2007) suggestions discussions on the topic were not helpful enough to be worth the trouble of linking there in my opinion.)

The LJLogin (Firefox) dev, slarti sounds plenty mad on the grounds that it sounds like LJ knew this would break LJLogin before it was rolled out but did not give notice, did not include the change in a numbered release so there was no mention in the release notes, made the change at the same time as a numbered release which made it less obvious to the external observer what was going on, and has not made the actual nature of the changes easy to track down. The dev of LJ Juggler (Chrome) also joins the thread.

I am sure it could have been handled more gracefully, but I'm still willing to extend LJ the benefit of the doubt and hope that the next time something comes up that will affect legitimate users using mostly a single third-party tool, that they take the time to notify the maintainer of that tool as a courtesy. (It is much easier for me to feel this placid generosity of spirit now that, in the words of james_nicoll "I do not personally have a squid in this fight".)

I hope things improve for everyone, except for the spammers. Those can go crawl off a cliff or something. I don't like spam.

Filtered ham

I get a fuckton of email (by my reckoning). When my parents got the mail when I was a kid, FatherSir would ask "Is it someone who loves me, or loves my money?"

I use Gmail, and Gmail is really good about sorting stuff. Of course, that's not much good unless I tell it what to do.

When I get email from someone who loves my money (that is to say, a company who I've done business with in the past who I might want further contact from), I head for the "Filter messages like these" (from the "More" menu). I try different search options until I get something that looks like it'll get all of the messages of that nature from them.

Once I have that, I ask Gmail to tag all incoming messages with my "Coupons & Sales" label, optionally creating a subtag for that specific company. This way if I'm going to be shopping there, I can easily look and see if there's a current promotion before I check out. It also helps me identify what's likely to not be important when I look at my inbox.

I have a separate-but-related process for high-volume, low-importance notifications. Often I can't just dismiss the entire source, because that might blackhole things like "btw your account is on fire" or "hey, we just shipped your package". When I get those, I create a filter search that identifies that particular form of "noise" from that source (sometimes a source emits more than one kind of noise: I get a lot of email from Dreamwidth that I need to know about, but Dreamwidth's poll votes, birthday notifications, and invite code notifications are need to not clog up my day even though I want to know they're happening). Once I have the search honed, I instruct Gmail to tag all of these messages with the label "Probably dismissible". (If I feel like it, I go back and also have them automatically tagged with a label that tells me what it is, often color-coded.) (Most times when I create a "coupons & sales" search, I then go right back and put that same search in for "probably dismissible".)


A few times a day, especially if mail has stacked up, I search my inbox: "In:inbox label:Probably dismissible" which brings up everything that's been automatically tagged. I select-all for that page and look through to make sure that nothing that I actually need to take action on is in there (like if that birthday notification was for someone I need to buy a present for). I uncheck the ones I need to take action on and archive the rest of the page. Then I un-tag the ones that need action so they won't get swept up the next time I do that search.

I am still behind on my e-mail, but it's not the absolute pit it could be if I wasn't doing this.

44 tweets for 2011-10-26

In the last 24 hours, I posted the following to Twitter:

• Wednesday, 0002: 2.25 liters water + 1/2 cup baking soda = 5% solution. Stuffing baking soda & vinegar in the bottom of my bag. #OWS http://inbaraj.com/teargas/
• Wednesday, 0004: @shirozora If shit's going to be like this then I'm not going to walk into the city unprepared. Tear gas kit's going in my bag.
• Wednesday, 0004: @shirozora (I haven't been in the protests but friends have & I might drop by.)
• Wednesday, 0022: @shirozora omgggggggggg
• Wednesday, 0023: Freaking Comcast. Internet has been up and down all day like Jim Kirk (reboot).
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