Refusal to Investigate information they asked for.

[sockingaccount]

I'm doing this on behalf of a friend of mine. She has written most of this up for me and I've edited it. I'm using a sock account for my own safety but it's likely I'll get suspended if they're really just trying to cover this up.

Comments

[intrepia]

Hi! I'm a volunteer with LJ Support, and I thought I might be able to provide some information that would be helpful for you.

First of all, I want to clarify that LJ Support and LJ Abuse are completely separate teams. It's possible to move requests between the two, as you've noticed, but the teams typically have little to no interaction between them. They're managed by different staff members, have different training and guidelines, and don't have access to the same information. So even though I volunteer with Support, I don't have any access to information about any particular Abuse case.

However, I can tell you that if someone asks a very routine question in Support, there would be no reason to examine their account history or anything like that. For example, if I see a request that goes "Help, how do I make an lj-cut?" I would just answer it by going, "Here's how to make an lj-cut." So it would be routine for someone who had some sort of compromised account (I'm not saying that's the case here, since I don't have any information about this case, just in general) to open Support requests regularly and just have them answered routinely.

But, it actually isn't routine for Support to convert a community back to a personal journal. In fact, this is not really supposed to be done (I think the FAQ might even say that this isn't possible), and it is only done in very rare cases, as exceptions to the rule. So when someone asks for a community to be converted to a personal journal, then Support would investigate to make sure that that account is really theirs (since communities can have multiple maintainers, and the person who makes a community could get kicked out by one of the other maintainers and stuff like that). And sometimes Support might have Abuse help in this investigation, because they have more tools available than we do. So that might explain why the request was originally moved over to Abuse.

Again, this is all just speculation on my part based on what usually happens, and I don't know anything about this particular situation, but I thought it might be helpful to know.

Finally, I know that in Support, we are very short on volunteers right now, and I'm pretty sure that Abuse is in the same situation, so it really might take a much longer time than we would like to process, investigate, and answer a request. It really is possible that your request is still in progress and there just hasn't been anyone with the time to do everything necessary to get back to you with an answer, instead of someone ignoring you out of malice. As you can imagine, there aren't very many people volunteering for LJ these days, and Support and Abuse are both mainly staffed by volunteers (with staff oversight).

Oh, and again, this is just me guessing, but I think there's a bunch of data recorded when someone conducts a paid transaction (credit card information, etc.), so that might make it easier to investigate paid accounts.

[right]

I am one of the administrators of the Communities category and I'm just commenting here to confirm that what intrepia said about our policies on converting communities is accurate. In support, we never investigate further on normal requests that don't potentially pose a risk to someone's account security.

[intrepia]

But I asked for a community to be made a personal journal before and it was you that filled it for me, it wasn't moved to abuse so if it was as intrepia said that abuse do a check then why didn't they find out this "incriminating evidence" then? Why when I suddenly ask now why was I suddenly this "previously terminated user". I'm not asking you to answer since I know you don't/can't discuss that, just making a statement of why it's so random and confusing.

I will admit that the community wasn't mine, I asked a user (who's name I unfortunately can't remember) if I could have it and she gave it to me. If that was the case then surely I would have been told just simply no and not suspended for being previously terminated, which is untrue.

[intrepia]

As I said to right, I've asked to have a community turned into a journal in March and if it's as you say that Abuse needs to check the user owns the community and the persons history, then it makes no sense why, when I ask to have another community changed, they throw out this random statement of me being previously terminated. If they simply wanted to refuse to do this then that would have been fine and I wouldn't have complained.

I also known Support Volunteers don't have access to abuse as I've actually volunteered for support on other LJ-clone sites, I never made a complaint about the Support team, but the Abuse team who are seemingly refusing to do their job.

I understand that it's mostly volunteer run on the team, however a simple "We are still investigating" is not much to ask is it? To reassure the user that they are not just being ignored? It wouldn't take any longer than moving a request to "answered" and not giving any response and making them feel even more ignored.

Also as I said about the paid user, all she did was give them an IP address to compare. Though if they do check paid transactions that might explain it but it seems to me (not saying as fact, but from the way I've been treated) that I've been put on the back list because my accounts are not paid.

I know this isn't anything to do with you, but 3 weeks of being suspended and 2 without even an updated is ridiculous.

it's also a shame that I was part of roleplays but because of this i've had to drop it all because I have no idea of what's going on and it seems like I'll never get a response.

[intrepia]

I'm completely convinced now that they are ignoring it, not out of malice (and I never said they're doing it to make me suffer), but because they've realised what a big mistake they've made but don't want to rectify it, what's one user who complains they've made a mistake going to do, right? Better to keep them suspended so people who notice aren't going to distrust the team.

There are people asking for my journals to be purged also because of this stupid idea of purging suspended journals so I guess they're hoping it'll make them loads of money too.

I've got other accounts on those emails I gave them that aren't suspended and they haven't gone through and suspended them, if I was this notorious journal hijacker I'm pretty sure they'd want to find out quickly and would have given me a quicker response and suspended my other journals.