Heads-up, people: LJ has managed to get itself on the
Spamhaus blacklist by repeatedly failing to deal with the onslaught of (mostly Russian-originating) pharma spam. This is the reason why LJ's comment notifications are currently unreliable or completely absent. I've heard contradictory reports about whether LJ actually care about this problem or intend to do anything to fix it.
I think this means LJ is actually dying; pharma spam is like the ivy that eventually takes over abandoned websites. Personally, I'll be both surprised and sad if spam kills LJ, rather than either people abandoning the site because of its bad policies, or the site being restored to its former glory.
(Dreamwidth's comment notifications are pretty reliable currently, though they are blacklisted by some mail providers, notably Yahoo and SBC Global. I say this because there was a period early in Dreamwidth's history when they didn't have a mailserver, so there's a persistent rumour that you can't get comment notifications on Dreamwidth. That's definitely a killer feature! OpenID accounts can also receive comment notifications, but to do that, you have to go through the whole process to
validate your OpenID account, including giving DW a verified email address. It won't happen automatically.)
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| From: | ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1) livredor |
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| Date: | March 12th, 2011 08:08 am (UTC)
13 hours after journal entry, 09:08 am (livredor's time) |
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Oh, nice that you have access to configure your system to get round the filtering. I really hope LJ will fix this; on the one hand, it's incredibly bad for business to get on the wrong side of Spamhaus, or for that matter to make your users wade through spam to get to the content. On the other, their focus is so much the Russian side of the business now, where people's expectations are very different, so they may just not care enough to go through the effort it takes to seriously tackle spam.
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| From: | green_knight |
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| Date: | March 11th, 2011 10:33 pm (UTC)
3 hours after journal entry |
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Can you quote your source for this? (I am completely unfamiliar with how Spamhaus works). I would dearly like to update my LJ support request accordingly...
I am *very* fed up with livejournal. The games are the last thing - LJ seems to be all about money, all of the time, and they don't seem to care that they annoy much of their English-speaking userbase. Unfortunately, my friends aren't fed up with livejournal, and many of them aren't willing to follow me to DW, so I can either cut myself off from them or stay on LJ.
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| From: | livredor |
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| Date: | March 12th, 2011 08:19 am (UTC)
13 hours after journal entry, 09:19 am (livredor's time) |
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The links in the post are most of what I know.
Wikipedia;
Spamhaus' self-description. Spamhaus is pretty respected as blacklists go; they are very good at listing orgs with bad security which permits spam, without really caring about whether they are intentional spammers themselves. Also, they have a sensible appeals process, so sites can get off their list as long as they can prove that they've dealt with the problem Spamhaus is complaining about. This means that a lot of ISPs (and many individual geeks) take their blacklist extremely seriously.
I don't have a problem with LJ trying to make money, or concentrating on their Russian userbase which is far more commercial than the anglophone side. But I don't want to run my social life on a site whose priorities are to make money from advertisers by providing huge amounts of page views in the Russian political blogging network. I maintain a presence, more and more skeletal, here, for exactly the same reason that you do: I want to keep in touch with my friends. Some don't want to move because of inertia and network effects, some don't want to move because they hate Dreamwidth.
I don't have a problem with LJ trying to make money, or concentrating on their Russian userbase which is far more commercial than the anglophone side. But I don't want to run my social life on a site whose priorities are to make money from advertisers
Yeah. I said something similar a year ago, that as long as it was convenient, I'd use LJ, but I stopped expecting them to do anything particular to cater for me, and I didn't think people campaigning them to make grudging concessions was going to work, and now it's look more and more conclusive.
rushed