LJ Drama Llama

[suburban_panic]

Now with 100% fewer llamas.

warren_ellis, the author of Transmetropolitan, Planetary and many other comic books/graphic novels, recently had to abandon his popular LJ. He'd previously posted strongly worded warnings against posting unsolicited fiction in the comments. He has a compelling legal reason; it would be easy for a malicious blogger to claim

Comments

[opadit]

Hmmm, sounds to me as though Ellis is more than a little bit responsible for creating the drama. He could delete suspicious comments, screen comments, or even disable them if he's truly worried about legal problems. I think he created a scenario that was guaranteed to result in his "having" to leave LJ in a very dramatic way.

I wonder if he was just waiting for it so that he could witness the nerdpocalypse for sociological, inspirational reasons.

[suburban_panic]

While I agree that he's definitely stirred the drama-cauldron by posting a link to the offender's journal, I don't think that closing his journal is an unreasonable response. He has websites and message boards of his own, where he can just post new work or musings, including an LJ feed from warrenellis.com. There's no reason for him to have another journal for one-way communication.

He's been using LJ for specific, community-response type things, and he gets a large volume of comments. Even if he had time to screen and approve them all, the threat of being sued is too real for him to risk even accidentally reading something he shouldn't.

[opadit]

I don't mean to argue with you, just to continue the conversation. It sounds to me, though, as if he was looking for an excuse to shut this particular forum down, because he's overstretched. Know what I mean? Like someone with six e-mail addresses, three blogs, an eBay store, and a day job with deadlines on top of it all.

[suburban_panic]

  That's certainly possible. As much as I'd like to, I can't call him up and ask. =)

I wouldn't put it past him to go out in a blaze of angst. I suspect that's not the case, because he genuinely seemed to enjoy the interaction with people on his LJ. By the same token, however, maybe he's shifting blame so he can drop off without alienating fans.

I guess we'll never know for sure.

[derylykt]

I was upset when I read that today.

But nerd-dom has rained fire upon the poster.

Could he still be actionable if the comment was a screened comment? Wouldn't there be grounds for some action as it was a comment still posted on his electronic journal?

Just wondering. I'm just a hack, myself and not into that lawyerin' stuff at all.

[cheeserific]

I was just generally excited to have seen you use "nerd-pocalypse." Huzzah, sir. Huzzah.

[suburban_panic]

Bear in mind that when the Four Horsemen of the Nerd-pocalypse (Comic Books, Roleplaying, Collectible Figurines and Sci-Fi) prepare to ride forth, I'll be saddling their horses.