The journal of a random thinker...

For those wanting to know more about the recent DDoS attacks, yes, it looks like it was the Russian government trying to shut down the dissidents again.

As I said last time, while it's frustrating not to have access, LJ is a lot more than a social network platform. From the article:

"LiveJournal isn’t just a social network. It’s also a platform for organizing civic action. Dozens of network projects and groups mobilize people to solve specific problems — from defending the rights of political prisoners to saving endangered historic architecture in Moscow."

So while I know many are considering the move over to Dreamwidth and other such sites, supporting LJ is a way we can help support those who use it for more than a writing/roleplaying/social venue.


Also, as a FYI, LJ is giving paid users effected by the outage two weeks of paid time as compensation.

So I've been noticing in both my own journal and communities that I haven't been able to see some comments even thought it says there are more comments there than are actually showing up. Instead I'm getting a place holder that says (Spam comment) or (Suspicious comment).

Why are these showing up like this you may ask? In their rush to fight spam LJ has created a new filter that're AUTOMATICALLY TURNED ON in ALL journals and communities, which screens comments that are made with 'suspicious links' ie links that are not on their safe whitelist, so pretty much the majority of the internet. There is no noted way to add to the 'whitelist'.

What really gets me is that they didn't inform people that they were doing this until a week after it was done and that it was automatically turned on.

So how do I turn it off you might ask.

That's simple. Go to your Settings, click on the Privacy tab, and half way down where it says Spam Protection uncheck the box next to "Comments containing a link to a non-whitelisted domain will be marked as spam and moved to a special section." This applies to both personal journal and communities and the opinion has to be manually changed in each one.

While I understand how this could be a good idea, I think they went about it in a very backhanded way, and have implemented it poorly. There was no message to anyone that the link has been screened. It's automatically done. This went on for over a week before they said anything about it. There is still nothing in the FAQs about it even. The only way I found out about this way going through the support pages where people were reporting similar issues.

Please share this!

ETA: This links really illustrates the problems.