LJ Rant

[altivo]

Well, so far I've resisted thinking about canceling my paid LJ account, though the witch hunts have not made a good impression on me and the attitudes of SixApart management are apparently quite hostile to the principles that attracted me to LJ in the first place.

However, this latest is really irritating. A muck on which I had a registered character sent me a notice five days ago to warn me that the character was being considered inactive and would be expunged at 6 pm today. The address to which it was sent was my livejournal.com address.

The headers on the message are quite clear. Livejournal's server received the warning message last Sunday in the afternoon. It was not forwarded to my ISP until after 6 pm today. The character was indeed purged as per the warning, but I didn't know about it until after the fact because LJ sat on the message and did nothing with it for five days. And it's not that LJ was unable to reach my ISP, because they've been sending me notifications of comments and other stuff regularly all week.

Nice going, SixApart. What else can you do to kill off LiveJournal completely, besides aggravating the paying members until they cut off the money machine?

Comments

[quickcasey.livejournal.com]

Sorry about the purging.
I have nothing too inteligent to say.
Other than some have a lifeboat here;

http://www.greatestjournal.com/

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I know that. But I don't want to bail as long as I have so many active friends here. I'm just inclined to stop giving SixApart my money for whatever it is they waste it on. Apparently developing goofball graphical "gifts" is more important than providing consistent service, as we've seen time and time again.

uh, yeah...

[gabrielhorse.livejournal.com]

Good to hear :) I was going to ask if this means you're pulling out and vanishing. well, if you do get fed up- and since you're paying, I can't blame you- do let me know where you'll be active, 'cause I'd hate to lose contact with someone who thinks on such a similar wavelength as me :(

Re: uh, yeah...

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Nah, I won't be exiting. I just need to decide in the next month whether to renew my paid account. I'll be staying around in any case.

[kakoukorakos.livejournal.com]

Guess that's one reason I haven't given them any money. I just never perceived much value, or had much of a use for more icons than the 3 defaults (two of which I almost never use).

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Yeah, I've never seen that one and I like it.

I like having extra icons but no, that's not worth even the measly $25 a year. Many of the features that were premium when I signed up have since been given away for free to the "plus" accounts. I didn't mind $25 a year when it went straight to the original LJ developers and managers, but I don't like SixApart at all. They're a bunch of jerks and morons as far as I can see.

[kakoukorakos.livejournal.com]

That was a sketch I made years ago. Actually, just a tiny piece of it, and it's nearly poster-sized. Went through a lot of graphite on it, that's for sure.

Here's my only other icon, I use it even more rarely. I should use it more often in my political posts.

[gabrielhorse.livejournal.com]

I've never been able to put in the other two... it's tricky for me, given my particular situation- any tips for someone who has to use other people's computers?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Well, you have to have a digital source for the icon image, and it has to conform to LJ's limitations on user icons, which I think are 100 x 100 pixels, and .gif, .jpg, or .png formatted file. There's a size limit too, something like 50K. If you have access to a computer with image editing software (almost anything will do, you don't need Photoshop) then you can edit the picture to the desired size and upload it. Lacking that, I suppose someone else could do it for you, if the picture is already on the web somewhere or can be sent as an e-mail attachment.

Actually loading the icon to LJ is simple, you just follow their instructions. The file must either be available on the web and have a URL that points to it, or else be on the machine you're connecting from so that it can be uploaded through the web browser. Once uploaded, the source file can disappear, so a temporary file created on a library computer or whatever would be fine.

[gabrielhorse.livejournal.com]

*reads, then blinks* oh... okay, I'll see if I can make it um, "work" or something :P

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I can do some simple editing for you if necessary. Just e-mail me the image or the URL for it and tell me what you need.

[gabrielhorse.livejournal.com]

LOL Well, I'll have to find somethin' first... I'll get back to you on that, but I may take you up on that. I sort of understood what you were sayin', but I thought you could just save the image to a file on the comp and it would be available for use... I wasn't clear on the pixel restictions before :P

[calydor.livejournal.com]

What was the MUCK?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Meadows, and it's true the character was inactive. I'm not so much agrieved by the purge itself as by the lack of delivery. I use redirection on my e-mail all the time. The other networks that forward mail to me always manage to deliver within an hour at most. It is entirely possible that I could miss a genuinely important message due to LJ's neglect.

[gabrielhorse.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that many days for an email sounds almost antiquated- fast for the pony express, but geez- even some snail mail gets to you within that time frame!

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Most servers cancel and return any e-mail that can't be delivered in three days. LJ has had repeated difficulties with e-mail delivery going back as long as I've been a user (about 3.5 years) though. While the volume they handle is certainly large, the competencies required for doing that are well-defined today and they really have little or no excuse for their continued erratic performance. I find it really irritating that they continue to add pointless "features" (like cell-phone text delivery of notifications) when they still haven't made their base-line services rock steady reliable.

[gabrielhorse.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'd think so... it makes me scratch my head a little. I mean, a day maybe- due to the volume- but that long? I dunno.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I'm sure it's just neglect. They don't monitor their equipment, which is apparently a very large farm of machines with functions distributed across them. They've also got a web of software now that is so complex they can't always make a small change without breaking a lot of stuff.

[shadow-stallion.livejournal.com]

Sorry to hear about the trouble you are having with LJ. Why do you depend on their email account? Why not just use some other service for your email since we all know how wonky the email system can be here.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I don't rely on it exclusively. I have too many e-mail addresses and accounts though, and don't publish most of the addresses. Using redirection in some cases allows me to track the sources of spam or other nuisance mail, and I use the LJ forwarding address for that at times. It's convenient for people to remember, after all. They don't have to know any of my rather obscure (for today) addresses as long as they know my LJ user name.

However, if LJ isn't going to deliver on the promised forwarding service in a reliable manner, they should just cancel it. That's what irritates me. They continue to add new and silly features, like "graphical gifts" and cell-phone notification of comments (does anyone get so few comments that they need to have their phone ring if one comes in?) Yet they still haven't made their base services reliable and responsive.

[shadow-stallion.livejournal.com]

*nods* Good points but you know as well as I do that LJ is not going to admit that they can't handle the volume of emails or that they might be screening some.

They add all these 'neat' little services that a lot of people don't likely care all that much about and neglect to tend to their email services. They seem more concerned with luring in more paid members while their base services suffer. Just ask Avon how much he hates them for the trouble with emails. :P

I have tried to consolidate my email accounts into just one now and it works for me but I can certainly see how some people would want/need multiple accounts.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I use e-mail forwarding services to provide easy addresses for my various interest areas. For example, the LJ address gives direct e-mail access to LJ friends. Likewise, I have forwarding from arrl.net for my amateur radio call sign. That also gives me flexibility in where the mail ends up. I can read gmail from my cell phone if necessary, so if I go away from home for a few days, I can redirect an important address to gmail and still have full read capability. Separation of work and personal e-mail is also essential for me.

My primary ISP is Earthlink (and I hate them, but Mindspring gobbled up Netcom and then in turn was eaten alive by Earthlink, so here I am) and my e-mail addresse there are long-established. Notifying everyone who is likely to use them of a change would be difficult. Redirecting mail from there to gmail or other locations is easier.

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

LJ's email forwarding services are so unreliable, I do not use my livejournal.com email adddress. i am a paid account holder as well. I am not bothering next year though. The last straw for me was hearing that LJ are censoring posts on the LJ news community.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I didn't think anyone could post there but LJ staff. Or do you mean they are suppressing comments?

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

Surpressing comments. Namely comments that are critical of the way they run things.

The post in question is here:

http://news.livejournal.com/102907.html?page=10#comments

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

I do question any organisation that suppresses any comment made critical of their actions.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Hee hee. You mean like governments and political parties?

You're absolutely correct, of course. And time always brings them down, if they don't change their ways. It was precisely that sort of thing that finally triggered the rebellion that freed our library group from the BMUC.

In fact, we put it down to one particular meeting at which I and some others were critical of BMUC policy and leaders. We were shouted down and chastised for being critical and not cooperating with "the team." The end result was that our libraries walked out on them, and a good thing it turned out to be for us at least. They're still floundering.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Revolution!!

Uh oh I now work for the department of Education O.O *hides in the car park*