Current mood:

enraged

And So It Begins...Again. (The new 6A/LJ journal deletions)
Have I mentioned that I hate being right? People were calling me (and others like me) hysterical drama queens after the dust of the Great LJ Strikeout of 2007 settled and we were still bitching. And we were called drama queens for warning people off from buying permanent accounts because some of us didn't buy for one second that LJ/6A was sorry.

Sheeyah. Right. I told you so.

But that's not gonna help us now, is it? So down to business.

As some of you no doubt know by now, El-Jay is once more in Your Friends List Deleting Your Friends.

And they're deleting them for the same reason and with as much waring as they did back during the Great LJ Strikeout of 2007...only they're being slightly more careful about it.

Actually, that's not true.

There've been a few rumors for the past two weeks over on InsaneJournal's 07refugees assylum and GreatestJournal's fandomtossed that some journals were being quietly deleted. The highest profile deletion was mightygodking in HP fandom who was TOS'd due to DMCA order (full story here, as well as news that it's not just your main journal that gets deleted, but every journal you've got attached to your LJ email).

This latest purge is starting to grow in scope and size and once more is tackling innocent people in fandom.

Fuck you, 6A/LJ. Fuck you very much.

bubble_blunder has a complete round up of what happened, who it happened to, and why. Definitely a good first stop if you want to get the complete skinny.

innocence_jihad also has a a round-up of links on the latest.

synecdochic offers some suggests as to why 6A/LJ is going wonk-o again. Surprise, surprise, it's due to the current legal climate in the U.S. Hey! Remember the children's daycare witch hunts back in the 80s in the U.S.? You know the ones I mean. The ones where there was supposedly a national ring of Satanists diddling with the CYLDERIN and recruiting them for Satan? What we've got here is the same, only instead of children's daycare, think "social networking sites."

For more information, don't forget to check in regularly with 07refugees on InsaneJournal and Fandomtossed on GreatestJournal.

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So, anyone think that it's a concidence that deleted accounts are no longer shown with a strike-through, but with an unlinked bold instead? Or how about the fact that deleted accounts will never, ever show up on your user page until, you know, you hit that "more details" link at the bottom of your user page.

So, anyone think those big, new shiny abuse report links at the bottom of every single one of your entries are a good idea now?

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Sick of this? Here's some potential new homes:

djinanna has a nice overview of various journaling sites you might want to consider moving your shingle, too. I have a review of the InsaneJournal, GreatestJournal, and JournalFen options. Note that I am liz_marcs on both InsaneJournal and GreatestJournal, and scaryfairy on JournalFen (Note that I don't use JournalFen for more than commenting and posting fanfic).

If you choose to set up shop on InsaneJournal (InsaneJournal owner squeaky has gone out of his way to welcome fandom and made clear that it would take a DMCA or court order to force a suspension), mllesatine has a list of useful links for the site

ETA: elke_tanzer has some other excellent options to protect yourself from LJ-related obliteration from the net.

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Some ways to protect your data from getting lost:

LJArchive (Windows only) will download your entire journal (including comments) to your hard drive. It's a nice, electronic, searchable database that I've found to be dead useful. It's certainly more useful than LJSeek if you're looking for the link you vaguely remember posting in a reply to someone who commented on your journal at 3 a.m. two years ago.

LJBook (Windows and Mac) creates a PDF copy of your entire journal and preserves everything. PDFs are also searchable if you use the Search Function, although probably not as flexible as the LJArchive Search Function.

If you're looking for migrate to another journaling service LJ-SEC will allow you to move every single entry from LJ to any other site that uses LiveJournal code. Here's my experience using LJ-SEC, including positives and negatives. This is definitely a thumbs-up option, especially if you're moving over to InsaneJournal.

If you're not quite ready to jump ship, but think it's time to start multi-posting on several sites, Semagic allows multiple posting with one click. Just following these instructions and you're pretty much able to multi-post on any number of journals.

Afraid to make the move because you don't want to lose your Flist? These instructions will tell you how to syndicate all your friends to your new journaling home.

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I don't know how much I'll be able to keep up with what's going on, since, y'know, I gotta work for a living. The above links should help you get started so you can do whatever you need to do.