The line has been drawn.

After 5 days waiting for something from Six Apart i was honestly hoping for something better than this. I am indescribably underwhelmed. It took five days to put that load of waffle together?!

Here is my final word on the matter:

Really not impressed.

Where is the explanation of what constitutes artistic merit?

“You’re only in trouble if you get reported” does not sound like a guideline to me.

Why have i had no response to the abuse report i made?

Where is the public apology from burr86?

Ugh. After 5 days waiting i was hoping for better than this. I determined not to post anything to my journal or any community until there was a decent explanation. In my opinion that has still not come.

Give brad a kiss for me. I loved LiveJournal when Brad was in control.

Six Apart, take the middle finger. Goodbye.

I refrained from making any posts since Sunday, even in the deathly_cntdwn community, which i miss. Unfortunately i can’t even post OpenID comments there, since LJ treats OpenID the same as Anonymous, and the community has Anonymous commenting switched off. I was hoping that after a word from Six Apart i’d feel comfortable to log back in with my LJ identity, but i have to say i do not. Which is a shame. Eight posts full of comments prove that as well as being entirely pissed off, people really do still care about LiveJournal.

Personally, i have wasted enough time with LiveJournal. I’d love to see a mass exodus, and i’m encouraged to see all the discussions going on as to what people want, and maybe some very clever people will make a few new sites that will be just what fandom needs. I know a lot of people will stick with LiveJournal, but really it’s creeping death now, since the Six Apart screw-ups seem to be getting more frequent. I hope that my getaway will prove to others that it’s an easy and rewarding thing to do.

Made of WIN!!!

Der Spiegel has an article about the EPIC FAIL of LJ/6A. (here is a translation)

Today i emailed The London Paper, London Lite and Evening Standard to let them know what’s going on. I picked up a copy of The London Paper that was lying around on the train home, but i haven’t had time to read it yet. Even if it’s not in today, i’m glad i made them aware of the situation. Perhaps i ought to phone them!

In the meantime Six Apart have spent another day completely ignoring us all. We’ve filled up at least another two news posts – that’s another 10,000 protest comments, but still nothing. A few users did get responses to their email complaints last night. They were basically a pile of copy pasta, saying there was an announcement on the way to lj_biz. That announcement has still not appeared. Such lies!

I have spent the whole afternoon singing “Do you see the fandoms spam?” to myself, which is based on “Do you hear the people sing?” from Les Misérables, one of my favourite musicals! It is for the win!! :)

A turning point in Internet history

It has been confirmed: Brad Fitzpatrick is leaving LiveJournal. This is great. I think once Brad goes a whole lot of people will be less inclined to hang around. Those of us who remember the good old days before Six Apart came and ruined LiveJournal, many of us were only hanging around out of love for how it used to be, and holding a vague hope that things wouldn’t get too much worse. Brad was our reminder of the humble origins of LiveJournal; i think we felt quite a loyalty to the founder. Brad leaving could be the catalyst for a lot more people jumping ship.

Happily, Brad has left us with the most perfect tool to use to keep together whilst we all disperse from LiveJournal: OpenID! Even as we go our separate ways, we have OpenID as a de-centralised way of asserting our identities wherever we go. It’s a shame GreatestJournal doesn’t support OpenID; i hope that changes soon.

With the technology tools we now have: RSS and RSS aggregators, OpenID, pingback and trackback, we can definitely retain our sense of community and connectivity, without needing to be on the same site. I do believe this is a very exciting moment in Internet history! :)

Now SERIOUSLY hacked off at LiveJournal.

They’ve had a whole day, and they have not even acknowledged that anything is going on.

The only good news we’ve had all day is that Brad is rumoured to be leaving LiveJournal.

Meanwhile, several thousand angry LiveJournal customers have now filled up five news posts, each with 5,000 comments. And we’re well on the way through the sixth.

Because this is now serious business, i filed an abuse report:

Dear Six Apart,

You might have noticed something is happening in LiveJournal’s news posts. Are any of you ever going to have the courage to address this problem, or even acknowledge it?

Whilst it has most certainly been far more entertaining than anything on television tonight, we are not actually doing this for fun. We are trying to get your attention.

I personally would like to see an explanation for the two randomly purged users. Don’t tell me they broke Terms of Service because if they did then so did a lot of other people in the very same community, who have not been purged. Fandom is collectively crying out for some sort of explanation to your inconsistency.

I’d also like a public apology from burr86 for the mocking comments made on Saturday. If not, i would be very happy to see burr86 sacked from Six Apart.

At the very least it would be nice to have an acknowledgement that you’ve noticed there is a situation going on and you’re planning to do something about it, rather than sitting around eating pizza or making baby Franks, or whatever it is you’ve spent the whole day doing.

By the way, feel free to suspend me, or purge me, whatever. I’ve made my goodbye post and i’ve set up an independent journal, hosted myself, where i will certainly make a great deal of noise if you do decide to delete me from LiveJournal.

Waiting for your response,
Aimee.

I am seriously very angry about this. All weekend we gave them the benefit of the doubt, thinking we’d get something on Monday. But it’s been a whole working day, and still nothing. Big, bold, underlined, struckthrough, flashing capslock could not even begin to convey the anger that i feel towards Six Apart tonight.

LiveJournal Monopoly

This is quite funny, even with the current anti-LJ feeling going around:

LJopoly

I’d like to play this! :) I love the Lulz and FTWs: “Get unsuspended free”, “Go troll the Seattle community”, “Surprise Buttsecks gets you $25″, “U showed ur tits on the intertubes. Collect $50 from every playa”.

Apparently Brad likes it! :)

Update: Oh, fantastic! I also just managed to send a pingback, or trackback, or whatever it’s called! Now a summary of my post is appearing that LJopoly post! That’s fun! :) I’ve wanted to try that out for ages, but LJ never supported it.

Well that was a fun day!

I can’t help but wonder what Six Apart/LJ staff are making of all this drama. Maybe they don’t care. Flooding the news posts doesn’t seem to have done any good. I think it’s pretty much just giving LJ more money because every time we reload, it loads up the Google ads. Are we still just a tiny little drop in the whole world of LJ? I don’t think i’ve ever seen the users quite this riled up, and yet, nobody at LJ is making any sort of attempt at a response. I know it’s the weekend and all, but you’d think someone would give a damn, wouldn’t you?

Heh, that post where burr86 made a stupid remark about six-year-olds having sex, prompting a surge of very angry people shouting back, got deleted. The moderator of the community didn’t appreciate the post being turned into a very hot flame-war. So of course, thousands of people wanted screenshots of the original comments, which some forward-thinking people had already thought to provide! Their servers promptly crashed as everyone went to have a look!

Then a news article appeared at firefox.org, got lots of linking … and then firefox.org went down!!! It’s back up now, i think.

A very good article has now appeared on darksiderainbow.net which explains the whole situation very well and very fully. The author really understands that it’s not about two people being deleted, and it’s not about whether or not the characters portrayed were underage. It’s about LiveJournal not having clear rules, acting suddenly and not explaining themselves, and ignoring literally thousands of pleas for clarification.

This is big. This is the most epic screw-up i’ve ever seen on LiveJournal. I’m just so glad i can sit over here and observe from a distance! :) Although i still have a presence on LJ because Liz kindly syndicated this blog for me: aimee_mychores.

All packed up and gone from LiveJournal!

I have made my closing post at LiveJournal. I have changed my profile page there to simply give a comment that i made in the news community earlier today:

LiveJournal, i loved you but i hate what you have become since Six Apart took over. I have just HAD ENOUGH. You’ve pushed me too far this time. I’m going it alone where i am free to post what i want without fear of idiotic censorship and such cruel insensitivity.

Happily, thanks to the wonders of RSS and OpenID (which is, by the way, one of the best inventions the Internet has ever seen – thank you Brad!) i will not miss LJ. I’m better off without you.

I’d tell you to sort out your priorities, but it seems clear that you have done that, and they are unfortunately not the kind of priorities that i wish to be associated with. So this is goodbye.

Ahhh, it feels so good. It’s like i’ve moved house, and now i’m able to settle into my luxurious new blog that is all my own.

The spam is still going on in the LJ news community. Two posts have already been filled up to their limit (5000 comments) and the next one only has 1000 comments to go. Still nothing from Six Apart. Except they did manage to make a joke about it in a completely separate post. Sickening behaviour.

Heh, this latest outbreak of drama has already been noted on Wikipedia:

On 3rd August 2007 the controversy reignited when two users’ journals were deleted due to posting of explicit fan art. In both cases LiveJournal claimed the artwork contain depictions of minors engaging in sexual situations. As of 4th August LiveJournal had not made a statement to its users, despite several thousand complaint posts being made on Livejournal’s News community

We also managed to break the LJ servers temporarily. There was at least half an hour, probably more, when we were getting databases all over the place. I would have laughed if that had lasted longer. This is starting to affect everyone, and just gives all the more reason for more people to up and leave.

In other news, i did manage to get out today. It’s amazingly beautiful weather today, far too good to stay indoors bitching at LiveJournal all day! My partner and i went out for a nice walk down to Sainsburys and back! :)