Whee, more LJ features! r69! Lest people not have caught on by now, this meta is brought to you by Azz-the-blogger, not Azz-the-LJ-volunteer. I have slightly mixed feelings about these features, but since it's given me something that I can use in a way consistent with my deepest darkest adolescent fantasies, I'm immensely happy.

(A lot of my online presence is explained by the fact that basically, I want to grow up to be Ariane Emory. Except without the taste for teenage boys, without the cancer, without the getting murdered, without the slave-labor society, without the family problems, and without the being a complete ruthless powerhungry unloving battleaxe things.)


If you have a Facebook account and want to comment on LJ, you can do that with Facebook Connect now. ( Read more... )

If you have an OpenID or (shiny new) Facebook Connect account on LJ, you can turn it into a Real Account (http://www.livejournal.com/manage/settings/?cat=account -- http://pics.livejournal.com/marta/pic/000pg6pq). Not sure if this is documented yet, but people in Suggestions have wanted this for years, and I'm very happy they're getting it.


Link accounts to cross-post entries and/or comments to Facebook (http://www.livejournal.com/manage/settings/?cat=extensions):
I don't care for this and won't use it, because I keep my real name and my legal name separated. Mostly this does not concern me, because the connection is made in the LJ settings and is opt-in, rather than having Facebook assume that since I'm logged in to Facebook in this browser, it's perfectly OK to make the connection. This is why I'm not in sudden hysterics. ( Read more... )

Link accounts to cross-post entries and/or comments to Twitter: I like this, I have it set up, and I'm using it. More about that after I describe it.

Once one opts in, by entering one's Twitter username in the thingy on the page http://www.livejournal.com/manage/settings/?cat=extensions, and then one ticks the checkboxes for whether this is done by default or not, for entries or comments.

• ( Read more... )
  (If you comment to a non-public post, the box is unticked, but you can manually tick it. If you do manually tick it and your Twitter account is viewable by people who are not the people who can view the entry, this does erode -- or actively violate, especially if you're top-quoting something they said -- the privacy of the journal owner. This is a greater or lesser degree of privacy erosion depending on exactly what you said, and the fact that there's now a link to a locked entry floating around that wasn't floating around before. Some of your friends are going to get mighty pissy at you if you do that shit.)


• There is not a way to prevent someone else from posting a link to their comment in your space, except by advising your friends that this is not cool with you.

The main beef I have with this is not the privacy thing, because it's unticked by default on locked entries and most of my friends are not fucking idiots, but actually the tab order. It used to be comment subject, comment, submit. Now it is comment subject, comment, settings, (ticky 1), (ticky 2), submit. This is sort of not helpful, but it is also the sort of UI thing that can get fixed given some developer time.

How I'm using it: I've got a bit of a complicated dodge going now, that I actually just set up a few days ago for some other stuff. Followers of my Twitter account will see that I have a lot of Delicious links in there. I am also using http://readitlaterlist.com/ to manage my proliferation of tabs, which is ... actually doing more than I thought. Thanks, afuna! And I do want to log the things I read, but not all of them are suitable for public linking, because of one or all of the following: too high-volume, too much like a recommendation of the link, because other people don't need to know that I was reading that. So I've set up a locked Twitter account, used Twitterfeed to connect the one to the other, and then Twittinesis to connect the other to the ... default entry security private secondary journal that I have set up for backups. :-P
So I just set up my main account here to deliver my comments to that locked-down Twitter account, so the backups will ship with comment links as well as massive, massive linkspam.
Why do I do this? Because Ariane Emory had a lot to do with how I set up my brain as an adolescent, and I work better when I'm able to store a lot of the less-relevant things elsewhere. Since my brain files fairly well on the "What day did I do X? It was sometime around Y, maybe Z..." and if I can find Y and Z, and I have a log that would include X that's date-sorted, I can go through the logs to then locate X.

[Edit: Now that I'm awake, I have heard about pingbacks leading to locked entries, and this is apparently a bug under investigation which you should file a support request for if it happens to you; I hope they get it fixed soon because that is worrisome.] Pingbacks! I love pingbacks. I was sorry when they went away the first time. http://www.livejournal.com/manage/settings/?cat=privacy This is only on-LJ, public entry pingbacks, and they're on by default unless you previously turned them off. [Edited to correct: this is opt-out, not opt-in.] ( Read more... )

Originally posted by soph at Regarding the recent news on user purging

http://news.livejournal.com/127507.html went out earlier today with some inaccurate information about the criteria for purging inactive journals. That entry has been edited; as of 22:24 2010 July 14 (Pacific Daylight Time) the associated lj_maintenance entry (http://community.livejournal.com/lj_maintenance/128843.html) hasn't been, and still makes reference to outdated information.

Inactive users and communities will be notified that unless they take action (logging in, posting entries) they will be deleted & purged -- however, "inactive" is very narrowly defined in the actual plan.

The account must be (if a personal journal) not logged into, for 24 consecutive months; a community must go without new entries for 24 consecutive months. Users will be notified before this happens; community maintainers and moderators will be notified. Additionally, only journals with either zero entries or the single automatic entry that LiveJournal started posting to new accounts, will be affected. If a journal has more than one entry in it, it's safe. If a journal has only one entry in it, and it's something other than the automatic text supplied by LJ, it's safe. The feature isn't fully developed yet. Stay tuned to official LJ sources (which I am not).

Historically important stuff is therefore likely to be safe, unless somehow a world-shattering conversation broke out in the comments of someone's automatic first post (and those tended to actually be automatically posted privately, so immensely unlikely).

This also means that the people who were pleased by the thought that the person with three entries from 2001 who has that awesome username but hasn't touched their journal since 2001, will actually be in for a disappointment.

Avast! antivirus is reporting a Trojan on some LJ pages. According to the testing done by LJ Ops, there is no such Trojan present, and Support was unable to find any other antivirus besides Avast! reporting this.

If you're not using Avast! and you get such a warning, definitely report it posthaste.

My profound thanks to whoever was wearing the sanity hat tonight, and it's a distinct improvement on the previous 10 years as well! ♥


(Context for those who missed it: the embattled "unspecified" gender choice on LJ got re-labeled via the translation system to "It's personal", and then someone who was wearing the sanity hat re-re-labeled it to "unspecified/other", but not before news exploded.)

I got word of an LJ RTE bug that is causing data loss in composing and/or editing entries, so really, avoid the RTE on LiveJournal until it's fixed.

If you have the <lj user> tag more than once in your entries, with a user first and then a community, the RTE is eating the data between those tags.

This is if you are doing it all in the RTE, switch over to the RTE to post, switch to HTML mode to post, switch briefly into the RTE to look at it, have it in the RTE at all, either composing or editing ... in short, this is a bad, bad, bad bug if you use the <lj user> tag and the RTE.

Keep an eye on lj_releases for word on when it's safe to use the RTE again. (I will probably forget to tell you, because I loathe the thing like burning, and THIS IS JUST ANOTHER SIGN, MY FRIENDS, A SIGN OF THE TIMES. *marches about with cardboard "TITS AGAINST THE RTE!" sign, mumbling and shouting*)

00:11 rb appears to has no context. Who's Whittaker?
00:11 Kat|english Former LJ employee from the pre-6a days. His mom is famous.
00:11 Azz|Eee Whitaker is an old LJ employee, who appears in many jokes.
00:11 Kat|english Well "famous"
00:11 Azz|Eee WHITAKER'S MOM.
00:12 rb I remember hearing "Whitaker's Mom" but not why!
00:12 rahaeli whitaker's default verbal 404 or timeout noise was "...your mom"
00:12 rahaeli whenever he got stuck, that's what'd come out
00:12 rahaeli so, this eventually got turned around on him, and whitaker's mom jokes were the thing to do.
00:13 rahaeli "so, on a scale of 1 to whitaker's mom, how much does this idea suck?" etc.

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! )

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.

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, cleverthylacine 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. cleverthylacine 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