Livejournal News of the Argh: Friending Edition

[nookiepowered]

Hi, folks.

We spam the OOC comm interrupt your rare non-event weekend to bring you an unfortunately not so rare update on unhelpful Livejournal shenanigans

Comments

[apocalipped]

Oh. My.

[nookiepowered]

That would be the slightly more radio-friendly version of what I said when I found out.

[apocalipped]

I had a far less radio-friendly version typed up that involved a lot of flailing. I deleted most of it.

I'm going to just clutch at my pearls, instead. This is going to make new semesters into a nightmare.

[life_inshadow]

A nightmare and a half. I literally looked at this and considered never apping again.

I'll get over it, but ... oh my, LJ.

[necroslacker]

While this is gonna stink for friend adding, I totally get LJ's position here. The spam is insane lately so I'm pleased they're trying to be proactive about it, at least.

[nookiepowered]

I'm not sure it's doing any good, considering the huge spam increase doesn't seem to have died down at all since the change, but it's a rare instance where I can actually follow their thinking.

[glacial_witch]

I don't think I actually got friended by any of the spambots. They all just hit my LJs with comments offering Ugg Boots and confessions of a crush on my wedding journal.

So how is this supposed to be helping, exactly?

[nookiepowered]

My guess is that the spambots are (or were) using the mass-friending ability to get around immediate detection by whatever scripts LJ has set up for identifying suspected fake journals. So it wasn't that they were specifically friending the people they were spamming; it's just that they were friending a bunch of people, period, which made them look less like bots.

[pulseof_life]

Oh LJ, no.

[nookiepowered]

*passes the mind-altering substances and/or comfort foods*

[robinonadderall]

Newbies can also wait until oldbies have friended them and go to the manage friends page and check the "add friend" box a bunch of times as well.

Though that means I'll have to add new people on every account instead of being lazy and just adding it for the person I read the flist from.

[nookiepowered]

Yes - and removing friends en masse is still possible by unchecking a bunch of boxes. It's just adding that will be a pain in one way or another.

[throughaphase]

Yeah, this is gonna be a pain, but I can see why they did this.

At least it's only going to really be a pain for new characters. Do the huge sucky friending spree once and then the much-smaller new character additions in later semesters isn't too bad.

[nookiepowered]

On the plus side, while this definitely wasn't the reason why (it was just a scheduling & availability issue) there's going to be a slightly longer than usual period between apps closing and the start of spring semester this time, so ... more time to do sucky friending sprees.

[throughaphase]

Yes! And I'm still totally apping again. This isn't nearly big enough to let a once-in-a-while inconvenience stop me from having fun.