Live from Austin!

[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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This is how the universe works: The day when you decide “Oh, to hell with it, I’m not going to bother shaving!” is the day when the VP will decide he wants to meet you.

I’m back in Austin. The second flight was delayed, but not too badly. I sat and listened to This American Life, which I had downloaded to the Zodiac 2. One episode was about people who love their cars entirely too much, and I’m starting to understand that—it was good to see the round butt of a Prius again. The car says it needs its 5,000 mile service, so I’d better get that sorted out.

Private Eye refer to “The Curse of Gnome“: they note that companies that manage to screw them over generally came to a nasty karmic end soon afterwards. For the record, I haven’t been sticking pins in a Brad Fitz voodoo doll…but I can’t help feeling a little schadenfreude at the entire LiveJournal system going down, redundant backups and all. It couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch. If you’re one of the affected, now would be a great time to plan that migration and work out how to use an RSS aggregator instead of a “friends” page.