Live from Austin!

Effective immediately, the LiveJournal abuse team will be known as the LJKGB. That is all.

Another user gets suspended from TrollJournal for posting public information, info that had been made public by the person detailed.

The backstory is that LiveJournal has introduced advertising in the form of “sponsored communities” with third party identity tracking.

To quote the LiveJournal “contract” back in 2004:

It may be because it’s one of our biggest pet peeves, or it may be because they don’t garner a lot of money, but nonetheless, we promise to never offer advertising space in our service or on our pages.

The most recent terms of service are slightly different:

You understand and agree that some or all of the Service may include advertisements and that these advertisements are necessary for LiveJournal to provide the Service. You also understand and agree that you will not obscure any advertisements from general view via HTML/CSS or any other means. By using the Service, you agree that LiveJournal has the right to run such advertisements with or without prior notice, and without recompense to you or any other user.

Well, we’ve established how much a written promise from SixApart/LiveJournal is worth. The new advertising pages weren’t announced in the news to users, of course; they were quietly trailed in the community devoted to LJ’s business decisions.

Something else wasn’t mentioned. In addition, it appears that the “communities” are being seeded with positive “buzz” from user accounts set up specifically for the purpose. And when insomnia (aka Mark Kraft) did a little trivial investigation, he discovered that one of the people running the new “communities” was a SixApart employee with a brand new account, rather than a regular user. In other words, it appears that unlike regular communities, the new sponsored “communities” are to be carefully moderated strictly by Six Apart employees, doubtless to ensure that no pesky free speech will upset the advertisers.

In fact, perhaps in reaction to the latest round of criticism, at least one of the new viral marketing pseudo-communities is locked down tight so you can’t even join it without asking a Six Apart staffer for permission.

The latest LiveJournal Abuse Team abuse is “nipplegate”. Someone on the Abuse team decided that female nipples were offensive. When this was challenged, the terms of service were promptly rewritten to retroactively justify the decision. (Which, if you’ll recall, is something I suggested as a resolution for my disagreement with the abuse team, and something they rejected out of hand and claimed wasn’t possible.)

If anyone had any hopes that the purchase by sixapart would lead to a little more maturity and professionalism from LJ Abuse, it seems like that day is a long way off. They claim that a total ban on female nipples is essential, but that pictures of a dead baby with congenital defects are OK.

A bunch of people have temporarily deleted their journals in protest. I’m sure that’ll achieve precisely nothing; save LJ money on bandwidth as a protest? Who thought that one up? If you want to protest, take your content elsewhere. But I’m doubtful anyone will do that, though it does seem as if the number of active accounts on the system has started to drop.

Anyhow, I mention this because coincidentally, I’ve just finished migrating my Vegas pictures and writeups. The pictures are now on Flickr, you can find the writeups via search or tags. In particular, back in 2004 I wrote:

Which brings me on to the subject of breasts. They seem to be a major source of fascination in Las Vegas. You take an otherwise tired concept like a bunch of women dancing on stage, add a sprinkling of tits, and magically you have compelling entertainment.

I notice that one of the shows has two versions. During the day you can see the clothed edition, which is billed as suitable for children of 5 and up. In the evening, there¿s the topless version of the exact same show, which you need to be 16 to see. From this I deduce that young American children will be traumatized if exposed to the sight of human breasts; presumably they are all bottle-fed, which would also explain their later fascination with watching Vegas showgirls.

Ah, those funny Americans and their bizarre puritanical ideas. I remember being amazed back in 1997 when I discovered that Victoria’s Secret airbrushed the nipples from the photos of women modeling their products. Then again, since breasts can shut down an airport and cost a TV station $550,000, maybe it’s best we try to protect children fromlearning about them.

Wait, what am I saying? They’re just breasts. Get over it, America.

[For more cases of LiveJournal Abuse Team behaving abusively, check out http://ljabuse.blogspot.com/.]

For several years I was a paying user of LiveJournal. Now I pay for web hosting and run my own content management system. It’s not by choice; this is the story.

In a nutshell, following an altercation with a racist troll, LiveJournal suspended my account without warning, even though I had not breached their Terms Of Service. They didn’t suspend the troll’s account–instead, they announced that (contrary to their written terms of service) racist comments were in fact perfectly acceptable on LiveJournal.

Attempts at compromise to resolve the issue were ignored and rejected, even when I offered to delete offending comments. The money I had paid for the service they were refusing to provide was not refunded.

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