Where have you been, NotBatman?
So I haven't been posting very much, lately. The occasional Adventure! photo-bomb, but that's about it. My experience with LiveJournal is becoming strained.
Just over a month ago they introduced some comment cross-posting jack-assery with FaceButt. Aside from having no interest whatever in FaceButt and decidedly not wanting anything linking me to it (and even less FaceButt to NotBatman!) it was rolled out in an extremely poor manner. Bugs allowed secure content to be posted willy-nilly to FaceButt (who, by the way, have reserved the right to use anything posted there in any way they see fit) and there was a big to-do about it all.
The outcry in the news community post was extreme. Security issues aside, it seemed like no one wanted such a "feature."
So LJ fixed the bug creating the security issue, but they left the option to crosspost locked entries. The outcry (and the wank) persisted: Do Not Want.
So LJ said they would remove cross posting on locked entries. When they were damned good and ready. And eventually they did. But they also announced how to get around their "fix" in the same breath. That's just fucking classy, is what that is.
Eventually they removed that as well. What the vociferous masses kept pleading/asking/demanding/threatening for was an Opt-Out system where the journal owner can choose whether this is an option or not. What's happened instead is that people more clever than I came up with a touch of code which should disable the cross-postery, provided the commenter is viewing my journal in my style. (I force everything I see into my style because, honestly, some of y'all have really bad taste in design. :) )
Anyway, the "progression" towards integrating LJ with FaceButt appears to be marching ever onward. I set up a DreamWidth account right away, during the first wave. (You probably won't be remotely surprised to learn that I'm
notbatman there too.) Right now, DreamWidth is a lot like LJ was in the old days. There's no advertising, it's not overrun with spam bots, it's still running on an invite code system. (For which there is an entire community devoted to giving them away at
dw_codesharing, if anyone's interested. That's where I pulled mine from. They couldn't give them away fast enough, at the time.)
From there I was able to import everything from LJ in a matter of about ten minutes. Slick as snot on a doorknob. I have all my entries, I have all my comments, I've even imported my outrageously dull and out of date profile information. Tags and security filters imported. For that matter, anyone with an LJ (who is friended to me) should be able to log into DW using OpenID and see everything you could see from LJ. (Though I haven't spent the time to play with my layout and make things pretty over here.)
I was hoping that LJ would pull their heads out of their asses and it would all be moot and that my DreamWidth account would be little more than an archive, an online back-up. To be fair, they've gone back enough that I'm not so close to just bailing out altogether as I was, but I'm still not sure if it's real or if they're just buying time. The move to become one with FaceButt still seems to be marching ever onward and I just am not comfortable with that.
For the time being, I'm still residing mostly on LJs servers, but I'm ready to jump ship if I decide it's best for me. I'm still doing most of my reading on LJ. Even though my "real life" friends have mostly abandoned it years ago, those connections are still important enough that I don't want to sever ties altogether. (And I am under no illusions that everyone will migrate over.) The new friends I've made over the years is another tie binding me.
I've done some testing now and I've found that I can use the importing tool on DreamWidth to synch everything up, which is nice. I created the account a little over a month ago and just this morning I re-uploaded everything. The new content moved over, of course, but comments made only on DW remained after the import, which means that even if I do move over entirely (allowing cross-posting and commenting from LJ) I can still have everything all in one place at the end of the day.
Which means that at the end of the day, the place that will have everything is DreamWidth.
If the progression persists (and/or worsens) NotBatman (on LJ) will become explicitly "Friends Only" and really shouldn't impact any of you at all as any content will still be cross-posted.
It still makes me a little sad, though. I've been on LJ for almost ten years. I had a paid account for almost all of that time because I really enjoyed the services. Said paid status was renewed only a month or two before all this shittery happened, so they've got time to convince me it's worth staying.
But I turned off the auto-renewal.
I'm relaxing in over here and getting comfortable. Knowing that I can synch things was the biggest step. The look and feel is very similar (though I notice now that they don't seem to have a drop-down list of the tags I've used in their posting thingie...) I'm not entirely sure why, but it felt like an announcement should be made. Maybe now that I've gotten that out of the way I can start making actual journal entries again!
(This serves as an experiment in Cross-posting as well.)
EDIT: Holy shit, even updating the original automatically updates the LJ version! I don't know why that surprises me, but I dig it!
This entry was originally posted on Dreamwidth here. You are free to comment here or there using OpenID. (
DW Comments)
Just over a month ago they introduced some comment cross-posting jack-assery with FaceButt. Aside from having no interest whatever in FaceButt and decidedly not wanting anything linking me to it (and even less FaceButt to NotBatman!) it was rolled out in an extremely poor manner. Bugs allowed secure content to be posted willy-nilly to FaceButt (who, by the way, have reserved the right to use anything posted there in any way they see fit) and there was a big to-do about it all.
The outcry in the news community post was extreme. Security issues aside, it seemed like no one wanted such a "feature."
So LJ fixed the bug creating the security issue, but they left the option to crosspost locked entries. The outcry (and the wank) persisted: Do Not Want.
So LJ said they would remove cross posting on locked entries. When they were damned good and ready. And eventually they did. But they also announced how to get around their "fix" in the same breath. That's just fucking classy, is what that is.
Eventually they removed that as well. What the vociferous masses kept pleading/asking/demanding/threatening for was an Opt-Out system where the journal owner can choose whether this is an option or not. What's happened instead is that people more clever than I came up with a touch of code which should disable the cross-postery, provided the commenter is viewing my journal in my style. (I force everything I see into my style because, honestly, some of y'all have really bad taste in design. :) )
Anyway, the "progression" towards integrating LJ with FaceButt appears to be marching ever onward. I set up a DreamWidth account right away, during the first wave. (You probably won't be remotely surprised to learn that I'm
notbatman there too.) Right now, DreamWidth is a lot like LJ was in the old days. There's no advertising, it's not overrun with spam bots, it's still running on an invite code system. (For which there is an entire community devoted to giving them away at
dw_codesharing, if anyone's interested. That's where I pulled mine from. They couldn't give them away fast enough, at the time.)
From there I was able to import everything from LJ in a matter of about ten minutes. Slick as snot on a doorknob. I have all my entries, I have all my comments, I've even imported my outrageously dull and out of date profile information. Tags and security filters imported. For that matter, anyone with an LJ (who is friended to me) should be able to log into DW using OpenID and see everything you could see from LJ. (Though I haven't spent the time to play with my layout and make things pretty over here.)
I was hoping that LJ would pull their heads out of their asses and it would all be moot and that my DreamWidth account would be little more than an archive, an online back-up. To be fair, they've gone back enough that I'm not so close to just bailing out altogether as I was, but I'm still not sure if it's real or if they're just buying time. The move to become one with FaceButt still seems to be marching ever onward and I just am not comfortable with that.
For the time being, I'm still residing mostly on LJs servers, but I'm ready to jump ship if I decide it's best for me. I'm still doing most of my reading on LJ. Even though my "real life" friends have mostly abandoned it years ago, those connections are still important enough that I don't want to sever ties altogether. (And I am under no illusions that everyone will migrate over.) The new friends I've made over the years is another tie binding me.
I've done some testing now and I've found that I can use the importing tool on DreamWidth to synch everything up, which is nice. I created the account a little over a month ago and just this morning I re-uploaded everything. The new content moved over, of course, but comments made only on DW remained after the import, which means that even if I do move over entirely (allowing cross-posting and commenting from LJ) I can still have everything all in one place at the end of the day.
Which means that at the end of the day, the place that will have everything is DreamWidth.
If the progression persists (and/or worsens) NotBatman (on LJ) will become explicitly "Friends Only" and really shouldn't impact any of you at all as any content will still be cross-posted.
It still makes me a little sad, though. I've been on LJ for almost ten years. I had a paid account for almost all of that time because I really enjoyed the services. Said paid status was renewed only a month or two before all this shittery happened, so they've got time to convince me it's worth staying.
But I turned off the auto-renewal.
I'm relaxing in over here and getting comfortable. Knowing that I can synch things was the biggest step. The look and feel is very similar (though I notice now that they don't seem to have a drop-down list of the tags I've used in their posting thingie...) I'm not entirely sure why, but it felt like an announcement should be made. Maybe now that I've gotten that out of the way I can start making actual journal entries again!
(This serves as an experiment in Cross-posting as well.)
EDIT: Holy shit, even updating the original automatically updates the LJ version! I don't know why that surprises me, but I dig it!
This entry was originally posted on Dreamwidth here. You are free to comment here or there using OpenID. (
DW Comments)