You people are sometimes insane.

[azurelunatic]

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.

Comments

[wibbble]

I'm waiting for this to appear on Snopes.

[elance.livejournal.com]

Possibly posted here for the first time: http://ckll.livejournal.com/145734.html

[azurelunatic]

They say they got it in e-mail, and one of the things feeding the flames was icarusancalion departing a number of fic communities. I saw that on my friends list this morning. I don't see that as supporting this rumor at all. The FanLib wank is well sufficient to cause that departure, and the problem there would be hordes of people coming to her(?) journal, seeing that she's a member of communities, and flooding the communities with wank. Not to protect the communities from the notice of LJ caving to corporate pressure and hitting people with the banhammer for odd interests. If odd interests were a problem, one would think that they'd hit up other things first.

[theferret.livejournal.com]

You people are sometimes insane.

I thought that was a requirement to being able to have a lj.

[azurelunatic]

Yes, but it's also a requirement for fandom. The intersection is sometimes a little more interesting than we would want.

[rose-etta.livejournal.com]

This isn't LJ's fault, so please don't stand up and beat your breast against them.
damn! I was so looking forward to beating my breast against them

[azurelunatic]

Ohnoes! The boob as a blunt instrument!

[sithjawa.livejournal.com]

Regardless of rumor, having "incest" or "underage" listed as an interest in your profile (anywhere, not just LJ), or being in a community about it, could cost you your job. Posting explicit fic with underage characters (anywhere, not just LJ) (even if all characters are within a standard deviation of one another's age) could have worse results. This is a reality of the fact that (1) internet stalking and child pornography are big concerns today and (2) the internet is not as anonymous as it used to be, and employers and law enforcement have taken to doing internet-based investigations of people.

Am I wrong?

[azurelunatic]

You're very right. It's just that it's not true that LJ is hunting down people with these interests, and likewise not true that LJ is coming under enormous amounts of pressure to hunt down people listing these interests.

[niqaeli]

*laughing her ass off*

Sorry! Just. *goes off again* I'm not on Abuse myself (though I do keep meaning to put in my app); I am, however, friends with several people on Abuse. And this is nothing like LiveJournal.

Oh, the wee, easily panicked fen amuse me. *snerk*

[azurelunatic]

Indeed. I brought it up in IRC, and people who happened to be around at the time died laughing. Repeatedly. And then some of them asked what 'wincest' was. Evidently to a non-Supernatural follower, it sounds like some incestuous product put out by Microsoft.

[abbylee]

Hey, Azz, be warned that some people are linking using the cut-tag url, which means they end up pointing people straight at the rumour, with no disclaimer.

Which is even funnier when they don't give lead up themselves. Will you edit yours?

[azurelunatic]

I took out the cut and bolded the "hi, it's a rumor" thing. Thanks for the heads-up. (One of the few exceptions for my policy against logging in at work!)

[azurelunatic]

Official Commentary on the recent suckage.

[amireal.livejournal.com]

Furthermore:

The types of actions that would take place if the rumor WERE true, would not cause a slow down.

We the USERS can query for all users with a common interest. And I highly doubt mass deletions (if they happened) would be a noticeable event as well, considering the purges happened without a hitch.

Thanks for posting!

[azurelunatic]

It used to be that purging would cause massive suckage, so that's why they didn't do it for years and years, but they worked through that so that accounts would be purged a few at a time, not in a massive hit.

And anyway, accounts that were in violation of any part of the TOS would be talked to first, and then suspended, rather than purged without warning. In particularly bad cases, they might choose to suspend first and talk later, but they would never purge a user's account without that user deleting it and leaving it deleted for 30+ days. Even accounts that have done damn nasty things are kept around suspended as potential evidence. I don't know how long LJ plans to keep them (seven years? ten years? indefinitely?) but I should have caught the "purge" vs. "suspend" immediately.

[porntestpilot.livejournal.com]

I still feel we should be more careful as a group. Thanks for the information.

//is okay about being paranoid//

[azurelunatic]

Careful, definitely. It's not a good idea to leave kinks that are vastly unacceptable to the general public hanging around in public, and LJ is a lot more public than a lot of people think.

I like to have all my socially unacceptable fantasy-kinks clearly labeled as fantasy, myself. Saves explanations.

[penknife.livejournal.com]

Hey, can you confirm whether the language of the LJ TOS (http://shadowkitty.livejournal.com/53662.html) that some people are getting upset about is new? It doesn't strike me as new, but I really don't know.

[azurelunatic]

I'm not in a position to notice that (my official position with LJ is volunteer junior maintainer of suggestions, occasional support volunteer on the support boards, and class clown and cheerleader in the semi-private volunteer areas) but it does not look new to me.

Additionally, the user named in that essay there, whoulove, has been deleted, not suspended. LJ may have contacted them and they deleted their journal, but a deletion is a user-done activity rather than an LJ-done activity. LJ will suspend someone for doing something wrong or questionable rather than deleting them.

That said, going down point by point as I see them:

'not suitable for all audiences ... responsible' -- if you're posting G-rated stuff on LJ, no one cares. If someone complains about it, it's your fault, not LJ's, that you posted it.

Intellectual property stuff pretty much has to be in there for LJ to exist; I think that surely must have been in there since nearly forever.

'vulgar/obscene' -- dunno, but that's pretty much standard for most places; and usually they just say you can't be doing with that in someone else's space if they're complaining about it.

'remove content ... objectionable ... alleged to infringe' -- big HMM at the 'alleged' bit. On that point, I might ask for a clarification from the Abuse team. The rest, no biggie that I can see.

'terminate ... remove and discard ... without prior notice' -- strikes me as ass-covering so they can shut down trolling sockpuppets and spammers without being liable for keeping content belonging to them, even if that content is HLGLGLGLGLGLG or something more objectionable pasted over and over. (reference is to the Jerk City webcomic.) Could be used at whim to shut down someone, but in practice if there's any humanly reasonable chance the LJ is used to be on LJ for remotedly legitimate reasons, they poke the contact information and let them know that they're in violation. It would be obscenely silly to be required to notify an obvious Viagra spammer bot journal that they are in violation of the TOS and to quit it.

But, like I said, for Official Clarification, I'd ask Abuse. They'll have the lowdown. It's politest to have only one person ask at a time rather than have the whole drama chain come visiting, lest the boobies incident repeat itself.

[lilithilien.livejournal.com]

Oh get a grip people!! Not directed at you, Ashinae, I appreciate your realistic, level-headed post. But good grief! Let's all rend our garments and wail and lock up our fics tight so no one can read them and our society can be even more closed and secretive, all based on a rumour that's weaker than FanLib's Mr. Pink. I know we're all here for the dRaMa but this is ridiculous.

[ashinae.livejournal.com]

I had a wee moment of panic, because I had no sleep last night, and shouldn't be trying to read anything. I just saw the "Oh get a grip" and my name and I was like "But but but all I said was that the sky is NOT falling!" and flailed, and then read again and everything is ok. *G*

[corvus-coronis.livejournal.com]

Thanks be to ptyx for pointing me to this, because the rumour's been all over my f/l. Besides which, it doesn't make sense to ban a community just for having those words in their info, especially since how else are they going to effectively get the message across if they want to ban/rant about those things?

[azurelunatic]

I'd imagine that the original creator of the rumor was thinking of the interests as a way to track down the journals in question and sift through them to find ones that offended the Mundane Powers that Be, rather than a flat ban on all journals having the interests.

It's fairly easy to tell a community or journal holding the position 'the thought of fictional incest as a kink is wrong and bad' from a community or journal holding forth on 'real incest is not good, but fictional incest is hot, especially if it's Sam/Dean'. The recs list would give the latter away immediately...

To add to that, LJ as a place for hosting journals cannot get caught up in the active searching out of content that specifically offends one copyright-holder. It's one thing if the copyright-holder searches down the journals themselves that are doing iffy, iffy, iffy things with Sam and Dean, and complains about them. It may not hold up in court, since fanfiction is such a hotly debated area, but they're perfectly OK to complain about a specific list of instances.

If they complain "You guys have a lot of users who write wincest in public!" LJ legally cannot track down all the people mentioning wincest for them and banninate them. That puts LJ in the position of establishing a precedent for doing a favor for the complaining party, and they'll then wind up legally liable for searching and censoring for everyone, and it'll be their fault if they fail to track down and ban someone for their happy little bit of fic.

Lots of people just don't know these things.

I'm not technically either a lawyer or an "internet lawyer" or an Abuse team member, but I've heard enough of the team sounding off in semi-private, and enough rants on Making Light and other places, that I think I'm well-informed about this.

[rubynye.livejournal.com]

As someone who saw this news and freaked right the hell out, thank you for spreading truth, and I apologize for being stupid.

[zillah975]

I'm also glad to learn that it's not true, but I don't feel stupid for having believed it was plausible. I'd sooner be safe than log in and find my account's been deleted. Fandom_wank was TOS'd in 2003 for, as far as I can tell, no reason that was ever made clear, and yeah, that was a long time ago, but if they'll TOS fandom_wank, I can't imagine why it'd be unreasonable to think they might TOS a community that posts underage incest.

Rather than wait around to find out whether half my flist was being deleted, I mentioned to them that they might wanna be careful. I don't think that's stupid.

[nemaihne.livejournal.com]

Ok, first I've heard of it but with my general awareness that's not saying much. I have to admit, I didn't get much farther than:

"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."

Let's have a moment's disillusionment for a second. We are not large 'hear me roar' segments of the population. I used to hear this sort of thing in comics all the time. But most people just don't care about anyone on the 'fringes.' (You know, people who don't know who won American Idol or fathered Anna Nicole's kid because they were busy with less important things like reading and writing.) If anything did happen by dint of LJ users getting inflamed about a Marvel licensed product, that's because the comic industry isn't big either. It's fringe. Selling a million copies of an issue generally involves a lot of customers buying ten copies each. Anyway, sorry about the rant- but honestly...
OK. I'm stepping down off the soapbox now, because evidently MJ needs it for laundry.

[rnwannabe.livejournal.com]

"because evidently MJ needs it for laundry"

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

People need to lighten up. Thanks for the laugh..

[rabidsamfan.livejournal.com]

I was paranoid before the rumor got started, but that's because I've been keeping an eye on net neutrality and the Intellectual Property Protection Act. Which should scare you, too.

Check here: http://quicksilvereyes.livejournal.com/12845.html?format=light

[azurelunatic]

Lawmakers who don't know jack about the internet trying to legislate the internet is always cause for panic, it seems.

[wtfbrain.livejournal.com]

Okay, so *your friend tells you it's not true, and someone else's friend tells them that it is. Why are we supposed to believe you and not the other person? Granted, I'm not saying either one of the points of view is entirely wrong or right, but are you seeing the problem here?

[azurelunatic]

Most he-said-she-said doesn't have anything verifiable. I encourage you to check with the Abuse team if you're concerned about people getting suspended on the strength of controversial issues.

Other people's friends may happen to not be members of the Abuse team. I'm involved with LJ, I volunteer for LJ, so I know that if anything like this was coming in, the Abuse team would know about it, and when I asked, they would either tell me straight up what was going on, or ask me nicely to not speculate or discuss it in public. They did neither. They burst out laughing. I believe that they would probably be willing to verify that there is nothing of the sort going on if they were asked.

Further down in the comments, I have a link to an lj_maintenance post that discusses the root causes of the recent service suckiness.

[hotarunokokoro.livejournal.com]

...did i miss something?
i'm such an airhead lately!

[azurelunatic]

Tempest in a teapot.

Someone either got a wild hair or decided to stir up trouble, and soon a message of general alarm was spreading its way across LJ -- but very, very quietly, because if the Powers that Be noticed it, or if LJ took official notice of it, people would get DELETED! and the person who gave the tip-off would be at risk for their job! Oh no!

Except for the part that while it's a good idea to not be seen having controversial interests in public, the "LJ is deleting people and it is this issue that has been causing LJ to suck lately!" part is very much not true. It would have more of a chance if it were a chocolate bar sitting on the white leather seat of a black car with closed windows in the sun at noon in the middle of July, parked downtown in a no-parking zone next to the police benefit parade.

[beckyzoole.livejournal.com]

james_nicoll has an illuminating post about this vry issu.

[azurelunatic]

Indd. I s.

[woodencoyote.livejournal.com]

Ok, I know people were talking about the tags and interests being used to catch creeps, but what's the FanLib thing? I'm out of the loop...

[mistressrenet.livejournal.com]

The FanLib Thing. (http://www.journalfen.net/community/fandom_wank/1082060.html)

[azurelunatic]

Making Light on intellectual property, incidentally.

[ms-demeanour.livejournal.com]

I have no idea what 'fanfic' or those other internet-speak words even mean.

Ignorance, in this case, is bliss.

[iluxia.livejournal.com]

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEH?!?!

Damn them.

[angelofsnow.livejournal.com]

I just want to thank LJ for letting us be as free from censorship as we've been. My favorite thing about fandom is the variety and acceptance.

If I want to pass on this news to my fandom friends should I put it behind a locked post?

[azurelunatic]

Whichever you're comfortable doing.

[azurelunatic]

http://liz-marcs.livejournal.com/264871.html