Livejournal Strikes Again

So this post is rather late, but cut me some slack I've been in the dark for a week (literally! ) I was curious whether anyone here had opinions on Livejournal's most recent fuckery.

The bare-bones story is that LJ has been trying to *beef up* it's anti-spam defenses, but their most recent coding updates somehow randomly logged users in to other users' journals. Numerous reports indicated that users were able to view other users' inboxes and friends-locked entries, some users accidentally posted comments while logged in as other users, and were able to navigate other users' journals--therefore potentially seeing other users' billing information. Somewhat of a timeline of user reports compiled at this Dreamwidth entry and somewhat of an analysis here.

Cue LJ's support staff throwing gasoline onto the fire with a super passive aggressive explanation which explained nothing at all:

Quote :

The following occurred - while updating the configuration of our internal caching system, Varnish, for a few minutes the system began to issue cached pages from the users who most recently visited the same page, as the system considered this the most relevant source of data. Thus, for 3 minutes, some users may have seen pages which appeared as though they were logged in as another random account, but it was actually just a snapshot of the page of the last visitor. It had no effect on security, as it was not possible to perform any actions on behalf of this other account. When attempting to load another page during these few minutes, another cached page was served in most cases.

This issue primarily affected people in the United States; the Russian-speaking audience was almost completely unaffected because the changes occurred very late at night in Russia. However, we are grateful to those of you who noticed this and quickly brought our attention to the issue, which gave us the opportunity to quickly understand the cause and resolve it.

The changes which were made are intended to improve site security, and reduce malicious activity on the site. It will make it more difficult to steal cookies from public locations, or spoof them for malicious attacks. We're also working on a few other things:

* Better communication with our 3rd party developers

* More thorough testing before rolling out changes

* Finally, better communication with you about our development process

According to the numerous user reports, that post is disingenuous at best, and a slimy pack of lies at worst. New reports were coming in over at least a 24-hour period, so where they got the 3-minute thing from I have no idea. And given that there were several reports of users accidentally posting comments as other users it was possible to perform actions on behalf of other accounts. Not only does LJ apparently think its user base is too dense to benefit from any kind of explanation beyond "it's a cache problem," but what gets me is the utterly moronic list of things to work on, which aren't even context-specific. Like, gee, we'll try to let you know beforehand next time we break the site so you can all stay away for at least a day or two!

I let my LJ account expire a couple months ago, because I had no interest in renewing after the Facebook/Twitter drama, and now I'm rather relieved I made that decision. LJ seems determined to do everything possible to abuse and alienate its user base into extinction. What will they think of next

Passive-agressive non-explanations that blame the consumers for their fuck-ups are standard fare for LJ. They did the same thing on Strikethrough 2007.

Yeah, I have to say that I am of the opinion that those who still use Livejournal... kinda get what they pay for. It's like still having an AOL email address, or using Yahoo search or Internet Explorer.

So web 1.0.

I get the some communities are so ancient and cemented into their own internet existence *cough* this one *cough*, but the technology that they were founded upon has become defunct. Blogs, forums and other social networking sites have been developed and work much better than clunky tree comment systems. (Which, by the way, I hate the most. Treed comments are just a terrible idea)

I have no sympathy for Livejournal. That elephant can head to the graveyard.

Sakurelf wrote:

I get the some communities are so ancient and cemented into their own internet existence *cough* this one *cough*, but the technology that they were founded upon has become defunct. Blogs, forums [...] have been developed and work much better than clunky tree comment systems.

Whaaat.

Sutremaine wrote:

Sakurelf wrote:

I get the some communities are so ancient and cemented into their own internet existence *cough* this one *cough*, but the technology that they were founded upon has become defunct. Blogs, forums [...] have been developed and work much better than clunky tree comment systems.

Whaaat.

Sorry, trying to say two things at once

1) New technologies have been developed (Twitter, Facebook, um, make a random noise and it's probaly a social networking site. Bebop! Goojo! Mander!)

2) I've always liked forums better than LJ in terms of community building, such as clubs, interest groups, fan sites, etc (as opposed to single publisher blog style, "Mary's fashion blog")
Forums are just better able to organize and lay out the conversation of many people than LJ's cuts and treed comment systems, in my own personal bias.

I think trees and cuts are ok as long as they are for personal journal entries and attached comments from a handful of people who know you, but they completely fail as a method of housing a community that holds conversations or posts fanfic or whatever. Kink memes in particular drive me nuts >.< But they are not great for non-personal blogs, comics, or art galleries either and I see people using them for that all the time. Ick.

Oh, LJ.

Why did I buy that perm account I haven't used regularly in forever?

Knorg wrote:

Oh, LJ.

Why did I buy that perm account I haven't used regularly in forever?

I like to think it was in part due to my winning charm and clever use of syntax.