Look What They've Done to My Song, Ma... (Livejournal Shenanigans and Possible Game Changers)

[nookiepowered]

We interrupt your musical stylings, pre-Easter Peep-vilification and numb, Twitter-scrolling horror to bring you a once-again relevant blast from the past: the LJ vs. Dreamwidth decision.

Some background, if you haven't logged in recently: Livejournal has moved the servers for all of their non-paid accounts from the U.S. to Russia, and has a new Terms of Service agreement that logged-in users (even paid and permanent) must accept before it'll let you get anywhere. Said TOS puts all of our journals under the requirements of already-existing Russian internet/blogging laws, and adds some concerning new rules, including:

• LJ may delete your account if you haven't logged in (or if it's been frozen) for more than six months (6.1.1)
  
  
• LJ may release information about the receipt/transfer/processing of user actions upon any "lawful request of the competent authorities" (where "law" equals Russian law, authorities equals who knows, and what kind of information they'll release isn't really specified) (6.3)
  
  
• Posts containing Adult Content must be marked, and that's not based on our judgment, but on Russian legislation of what constitutes Adult Content.(9.1.3)
  
  
• Posts may not contain advertising or "political solicitation materials" (which could just mean not using it to run a campaign, or it could mean no saying "Urge your senators to vote against SB 242" - it's vague enough to apply to almost anything) without prior approval from LJ (9.2.7)
  
  
• For any journal/community that gets more than 3000 comments within 24 hours, a specific Russian law will apply where the journal is now considered Mass Media and:
  
  
  • may not promote "pornography" which may or may not apply to the textual version
  • may not use profanities (again under whatever Russian law considers profanity)
  • the entire journal must be marked as adult content if it contains any at all, in any entry
  • the user must give LJ their real name (or at least first initial and full last name)
• LJ may now send 3rd-party advertising directly to the provided e-mail address of users (12.5)
  
  
• LJ may freeze or delete any journal that violates any Russian law, which would include the ones about "promoting non-traditional sexual relations to minors" (9.2.8 and 11.1). Theoretically, marking anything LGBTQIA as "Adult Content" could satisfy that one (it's probably meant to), but aside from that being offensive in and of itself, there's no guarantee that it would, since it can be claimed that anyone can lie about their age to access that content and therefore it can't be posted at all.
  

There's a lot of what-ifs in there, but people are justifiably concerned about the risks to both their personal and RP journals, as well as their privacy. So, to the question posed several times in years past, "At what point do we reconsider the question of moving the game to Dreamwidth," the answer is now. The now point.

Like we've promised since the first time the issue came up, we won't be doing that unilaterally. We've created another LJ or Dreamwidth poll -- one that doesn't require you to log into LJ to fill it out -- and we're leaving it open until 11:59 pm EST on April 15th. Once it's closed, we'll tally up the votes and let you know about the results. If the majority vote to move the game, at that point we'll start hammering out more details on how and when we'll accomplish that together.

Things to know about the poll:

• You don't need to be logged-in to anything to fill it out
• You do need to leave a name so we know you're an FH player/gremlin/squirrel and not a bot or troll. (Unless you're Fosse.)
• Only the admins will see the name.
• Only the admins will see who voted which way.
• Unlike an LJ poll, you can't go back and edit your vote, but if you do change your mind, just vote again with the same name and add "Updated {date}" to the name field and we'll delete the old one for you.

Questions, comments, tequila?