PSA re comment notifications

[livredor]

Heads-up, people: LJ has managed to get itself on the Spamhaus blacklist by repeatedly failing to deal with the onslaught of (mostly Russian-originating) pharma spam. This is the reason why LJ's comment notifications are currently unreliable or completely absent. I've heard contradictory reports about whether LJ actually care about this problem or

Comments

[owlfish]

Thank you so much for this! If I get any more impatient, we can temporarily reconfig our mail server to work around incoming notification filtering.

I do hope it'll be properly resolved and very soon.

[livredor]

Oh, nice that you have access to configure your system to get round the filtering. I really hope LJ will fix this; on the one hand, it's incredibly bad for business to get on the wrong side of Spamhaus, or for that matter to make your users wade through spam to get to the content. On the other, their focus is so much the Russian side of the business now, where people's expectations are very different, so they may just not care enough to go through the effort it takes to seriously tackle spam.

[green_knight]

Can you quote your source for this? (I am completely unfamiliar with how Spamhaus works). I would dearly like to update my LJ support request accordingly...

I am *very* fed up with livejournal. The games are the last thing - LJ seems to be all about money, all of the time, and they don't seem to care that they annoy much of their English-speaking userbase. Unfortunately, my friends aren't fed up with livejournal, and many of them aren't willing to follow me to DW, so I can either cut myself off from them or stay on LJ.

[livredor]

The links in the post are most of what I know. Wikipedia; Spamhaus' self-description. Spamhaus is pretty respected as blacklists go; they are very good at listing orgs with bad security which permits spam, without really caring about whether they are intentional spammers themselves. Also, they have a sensible appeals process, so sites can get off their list as long as they can prove that they've dealt with the problem Spamhaus is complaining about. This means that a lot of ISPs (and many individual geeks) take their blacklist extremely seriously

[cartesiandaemon]

Also, they have a sensible appeals process

Dear British government: see, look, it's not that hard to run a blacklist sensibly if you actually DO want to...

[cartesiandaemon]

I don't have a problem with LJ trying to make money, or concentrating on their Russian userbase which is far more commercial than the anglophone side. But I don't want to run my social life on a site whose priorities are to make money from advertisers

Yeah. I said something similar a year ago, that as long as it was convenient, I'd use LJ, but I stopped expecting them to do anything particular to cater for me, and I didn't think people campaigning them to make grudging concessions was going to work, and now it's look more and more conclusive.

[dampscribbler]

Thanks for this, I had no idea.

I suppose it's time to bring my DW to life. I've been squatting there for years now in hopes that LJ will revive, but it doesn't seem to be working that way.

Maybe if I had enough sense to give up Facebook I'd get back to blogging/journaling in a meaningful way and find a place for it that works great.

[porisurd]

Great, I never knew this, thanks.

[livredor]

It's a bit out of date by now. Since I posted this, LJ have mostly fixed the problem with email notifications, but they've also been dealing with a huge Denial of Service attack which has caused a lot more serious problems. The site is often unreachable for large chunks of time.