coffeechica in lj_support

breaking news (broken news?)

Jan 23, 2012 16:44

1) Yes, inactive accounts will be purged. We're following the rules from this news entry under "Purging inactive accounts". Yes, communities and identity accounts are included. Yes, the email has typoes in it but it's correct and trustworthy, except for the date it gives for purging (which is some time in the past). Yes, there will be a new news entry ( ... )

tags: mini-status update

Comments (16)

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memoir

why do you have to say "yes" before every sentence about purging? i don't know if it's just me but it kind of made me feel like you were down talking me or are annoyed. otherwise, cool.

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coffeechica

Not intending to talk down to anyone; guess it's just my writing style. :) This is a community for LJ Support volunteers (most of whom I know pretty well) and I've answered those questions from many of them today and over the weekend.

No offense intended at all, and my only annoyance is pointed at the spammers and phishers. ;)

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memoir

Ohh, understandable. Sorry for the assumption.
I can't wait for journal purges!

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monkeyprincess7

Don't mind if you purge one of my comms, I never use it anymore. But as for the rest *kanye shrug*.

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coffeechica

It's really opened my eyes to the number of accounts I still have. :)

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pne

And the number of communities I created at some point which never took off!

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fiddlingfrog

Just collecting my thoughts here...

As I recall, if you delete an identity account you prevent someone from using those credentials to login again in the future. And the purging rules state that we're not deleting comments or entries posted in communities. So purging an identity account doesn't free up a username for someone else to use, it doesn't save server space because of deleted comments or entries, and it really only prevents some dude who left a comment once with his Facebook account from doing so again in the future.

Re: 3)
Any chance that this will be the final kick needed to get a more thorough and subtle CSS and HTML cleaner? i.e. capable of cleaning out only problematic class names or bad styling?

Edit: bad typo, bad!

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pne

a more thorough and subtle CSS and HTML cleaner? i.e. capable of cleaning out only problematic class names or bad styling?

I thought the consensus was that blacklisting (which you seem to be asking for: "removing only known-bad stuff") doesn't work, because people will come up with New And Improved ways of sneaking around your back - either now, or two years down the road when browsers implement some new feature that you don't even know of yet so you can't defend against it.

So that leaves whitelisting ("delete everything, let only known-good stuff through").

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fiddlingfrog

My thoughts were that a mix of black and white listing would accomplish the goals admirably. CSS could be returned to comments if the cleaner had a whitelist of allowed styling, and a blacklist of disallowed effects with those styling. For instance, disallow positioning entirely but allow for all display except for none.

As for DIV and CLASS being stripped out of entries this seems to be in reaction to last week's phishing attack. What I get out of this entry is that the attack emulated the LJ login in some manner. If malicious CSS could be filtered from custom CSS in journal styles, and external stylesheets disallowed, I think DIV and CLASS could be included back into entries.

For reference: previous conversations

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pmpe

You can export comments with S2.

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darciana

I opened this support request a few days ago concerning several CSS classes I created which don't work anymore. Are you telling me this is not a bug and they won't work anymore, no matter what?

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khyron

I'm wondering this myself, I tried to make a simple change to a background image URL today and the moment I hit save I lost ALL CUSTOM CSS to my journal...stuff that's been in there for years now. I'm heartbroken, and there's absolutely no way to fix it right now.

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