It Has Begun ...

[dawn_felagund]

... LiveJournal has begun suspending journals.

Currently, the suspensions are under the pretense of catching journals/communities set up by spambots, but this post reports legitimate journals/comms being summarily deleted with little recourse by the owner. The triggering factor seems to be that the post contains links to sites outside LJ.

This is worrisome because it's troubling that years' worth of posts are being deleted based on a script without apparent review by a human. It's also troubling because it signals that the administration, under the new ToS, is indeed willing to utilize item 2.5 in the non-legally-binding-English-kinda-sorta-ToS: "Users breach hereunder may cause termination of his/her access to his/her Account or deletion of such an Account as well as full or partial deletion of the Content or suspension thereto without prior notice" (emphasis mine).

At the risk of succumbing to a slippery slope here, my main worry concerns item 6.1.1: "The Administration reserves the right to delete Account and Blog if User did not access the Account or the access was restricted for more than six months due to a breach hereof." There is a lot of fandom history on LJ on journals owned by people no longer active in the fandom, and possibly no longer even reachable. Now spambots are obviously less desirable on a site than old journals that haven't been updated since the Second Age, but content = server space = money, and an unused journal isn't holding its weight in terms of ad views either. It's digital dead weight.

I don't know what should be done, or even if I want to do it. The HASA Rescue Project was a months-long drain on my life that I'm not eager to undertake again anytime soon or ever. I set aside projects (like the B2MeM ebook!) that I've never been able to pick up again. Perhaps when I reach out to people who posted to silwritersguild about the migration of content to Dreamwidth, I ought to include a note about migrating one's journal and communities to DW. I'm happy to help people do this, but I can't even fathom how to save content from LiveJournal other than accepting that it's every person for themselves this time.

(Thanks to acciochocolate for the tip on this!)

Comments

[greatandgrey]

...good lord. I'm even tempted to just delete my LJ because I don't want to be bothered with this BS any more. I've had it with LJ. For years it was my home but DW is nice and cozy enough for me.

I'm heartbroken over the fandom stuff that's going to inevitably be lost, though.

[ladybrooke]

If you include a note about migrating and need/want a second person to help people who need help, you have my email address and can send people my way.

On a similar note sparked by this, I know that the B2MeM community on here is mods only, but can you tell me if the stuff on lj is backed up or if I need to accelerate my efforts to post my stories from there elsewhere? (Not that I really have the time, but who needs sleep? :P)

[independence1776]

The community has a private backup; it is a complete, private backup. It's a separate comm, though, so it's not in the official community.

[ladybrooke]

Thanks for the answer, Indy!

I'm just glad it's backed up elsewhere (and this whole mess today reminds me that I need to just not post any fic on LJ alone that I can possibly post anywhere else).

[makamu]

I feel similar to you - my stuff has been saved and I am slowly getting back into the hang of things on DW (I hadn't realised just how lazy tumblr with its policy of no discussion has made me in terms of active fannish communication). But the fandom history that will be lost when LJ goes under - I dare not think about that.

I'll make a post to my access list shortly, to make people aware of this, but I have one question: if we do a rescue effort like with HASA (thank you for this, by the way!), is there anything I could do to help? Come the end of July I should have a bit more time for stuff like this, and I want to help

[la_samtyr]

It figures this would happen over a big holiday weekend. *sighs* I've been posting less and less 'over there' which is probably a good thing, I guess. (It's also why I usually avoided posting full links but I have done that in a few cases. Oh well.)

I have just now backed up everything here to be safe. I wish I could find more of of my f-list here though. And I don't think that things will "just blow over" anymore -- there's been too many changes for that.

*hugs*

[rhapsody]

*sighs* Of course still no reply from support, so I left a polite request. Funny that I can only do that without accepting the TOS.

[independence1776]

Lovely.

There's two Young Wizards communities I'm worried about (they're literally the entirety of the pre-Tumblr fandom, apart from the official forum and a comm that was imported to DW when the new LJ TOS went through) and a few people who left fandom. But while I can save the former if the mods don't import (they total maybe 600-700 posts combined), the latter is something I can't do. The HASA rescue was exactly that-- a drain I don't think I can handle again.

Perhaps when I reach out to people who posted to silwritersguild about the migration of content to Dreamwidth, I ought to include a note about migrating one's journal and communities to DW.

I think that would be a good idea.

[msilverstar]

Thanks for posting. I have quoted and linked here. I hope we don't lose all the LJ fandom history.