TrustFlow shut down by LiveJournal?

[ciphergoth]

I could be wrong, but it looks as if the LiveJournal staff are denying access to LJ data from the server that TrustFlow uses. This will probably be because it was causing undue strain on the LJ servers, but it could be for other reasons

Comments

[ruakh]

(1) If you e-mail webmaster(a)livejournal(o)com, they should be able to help you out. (That opens a support request in the Webmaster category of LiveJournal technical support.) If you've already opened a support request, ignore this point.

(2) My thoughts:
- I think it's unlikely that bradfitz or a LiveJournal employee has blocked your server without telling you. From what I can see, they're generally very sensitive to the needs of small-time coders, and I imagine that if they blocked you, they'd let you know first.
- LJ automatically blocks things that it perceives as a DOS attack; it also blocks excessive attempts at login. Since your server would only check four people at a time, I doubt it could ever look like a DOS attack (though I can't say), and I assume it would never attempt to log in?
- LJ recently changed to a new default site scheme [link]. If your code assumed that pages used the Dystopia scheme, then it probably won't be able to parse through pages using the Xcolibur scheme (this is just a guess on my part). Might this be the

[ruakh]

(BTW, I mean "small-time coders" in the sense of coders who aren't running companies with hundreds of thousands of users. I didn't mean that as a comment on your code, or anything like that.)

[wechsler]

I've no idea how ciphergoth's scraper code works, but mine hasn't seemed to have any problems with the transition.

[lovewithnoface]

very nice self-pimpage

[ciphergoth]

This is all really good and helpful, thanks!

I'm pretty sure we are blocked - "lynx www.livejournal.com" brings up a 403. Yes, it would be nice if they'd emailed me, but maybe they had to fix a problem in a hurry.

Five people at once in fact. No, it never attempts to log in.

I had not thought about the schemes thing. As it turns out, my parser works with all three schemes. Using the "lynx" scheme is a really good idea though, thanks!

What operating system are you using? I believe WinZip can unpack tar.gz files - don't know about tar.bz2 but probably.

[cheesetruck]

both winrar and winimp can handle tar.bz and tar.gz files, as well as zip and rar files. winimp also handles imp files but I think those are pretty darned rare, because imp never became a "big deal."

However, winimp is free now, winrar is shareware.

Cygwin also handles those archives nicely (:

(And yes, this is for Windows systems. I sort of take that as a given by saying 'winXXX' but you never know. I had someone ask me how to get to www.google.com yestarday....the mind boggles at whether to completely go with messing their head up more or to fathom the depths of idiocy...)

[ruakh]

I have Cygwin, and I assume WinZip (which you didn't mention, but which ciphergoth did) came with Windows XP.

The problem is that, despite being a decent programmer (if I may say so about myself), I am very computer-illiterate.

(I do know how to get to Google, though.)

Thanks to both of you for your help! :-)

[guppygrrl]

I'm always amazed at the amount of people who've gotten to my sites by typing in the URL into a search engine.

Hello. Why did you go to google and look up www.livejournal.com to try to find livejournal?

The mind boggles.

;)

~Kissy

[ciphergoth]

I sometimes type a URL into Google as a simple braino, since it's my home page. Since Google does the Right Thing I just click on the link.

Not often, though.