Monica

signal boost: if you are using Dreamwidth from Russia, please read

2023-04-23T22:20:41Z

From this Dreamwidth news post (there is a Russian translation):

If you are living inside Russia, or using any ISP that uses the Roskomnadzor block list, please keep using a VPN to access Dreamwidth. We do not know why they have unblocked us. It is possible that they have unblocked us because they want people to use the site on a connection they can control. We can keep the Russian government from getting any information from us, and we can protect the actual contents of what you post on the site, but it is possible that they can use the fact you visited Dreamwidth against you. Please keep yourself safe. Use a VPN every time you visit Dreamwidth.

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merging access filters?

2017-04-10T17:10:14Z

A quick search of the help didn't answer my question, so I figured I'd ask my readers before asking DW support (sometime after Pesach, which starts tonight).

We can merge tags, i.e. delete one tag and send all its posts to another tag. I want to do the same thing with a couple access filters; I have more granularity than I need. If I just delete an access filter all its posts become private; that's not what I want. I want to take this group of posts that all have access filter X and assign them to access filter Y instead, so that I can then delete X with no negative effects.

Anybody know of a way to do that?

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SCA people: find your friends

2017-04-09T22:25:27Z

SCA friends,

Did you just migrate here from LJ? Are you trying to find your friends?

Have you been here a while and would like to connect with our new immigrants?

Either way, please leave a comment here to announce your presence if you want to be found. If you changed your user name from LJ to DW, be sure to mention that. Let's make it as easy as possible to rebuild the SCA network over here.

And if you're already somewhat connected here on DW, please boost the signal!

(And if you know of somebody who's already doing this, please let me know and I'll update this post to point to that one.)

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LJ users: claim your imported comments

2017-04-09T21:50:43Z

Now that you've imported your LJ journal to Dreamwidth, you might have noticed that you have some "people" on your profile of the form "lj-username.livejournal.com". Those are OpenID accounts, and by default they're attached to imported comments. If you've ever posted a comment on a journal that was imported here, you have one of these too.

You'd probably rather see your comments as coming from "you", not "you.livejournal.com". Fortunately, you can claim them -- so long as you still have your LJ account to authenticate to. Then they'll show up as coming from "you" like they should, and you'll have the usual ownership rights (edit, delete) on them.

Here's the documentation. Basically, you log into LJ, tell DW "that's me", wait an hour, and click on the link they email you. That's it.

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LJ to Dreamwidth in a hurry (5 minutes)

2017-04-07T22:57:43Z

Dear LJ friends who are pressed for time:

Yeah, having to do this in a hurry sucks. But if you can spare just 5 minutes, you can copy your LJ content over to Dreamwidth. You can defer actually doing anything with it until later, but at least you'll have it somewhere other than the Russian servers.

**Note** (pointed out in a comment): you can only import your journal here if you've accepted the LJ TOS.

Step 1: create an account on Dreamwidth:

You can skip everything other than choosing a name and password for now. Come back and browse account settings when you have some time. (You can even skip the email-validation step for now, though you should do it at some point.)

Step 2: go to the Import Content tool:

Choose LiveJournal from the list. Enter your LJ user name and password. Check all the boxes in the "what to import" list. Click submit. Wait a while (possibly a couple days because of current load).

That's it.

Don't worry; your journal entries will keep their security groups. You're not leaking private stuff to the world.

When you have another 2 minutes: claim the comments you posted over on LJ that have been migrated here. Get rid of that ugly "username.livejournal.com" and replace it with your DW account. You'll need to do this while your LJ account still exists.

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LiveJournal terms of service

2017-04-07T03:24:37Z

I don't have time to do a close reading of the new LiveJournal terms of service right now, but there are a few things there that are deal-breakers for me:

I would be bound by a TOS document that I cannot read. They're very clear that the English translation is non-binding and the Russian original is the actual agreement. I am not equipped to review it.
I would be bound by Russian law, and they explicitly mention political "solicitation". It's unclear whether a post stating an opinion they don't like is enough to be on the wrong side of that rule (since, you know, I don't know much about Russian law). It seems likely that doing something like announcing an event would be. While I haven't done much of this, I'm not prepared to say that I've done zero. I certainly won't commit to doing zero in the future.
They disallow external retrieval, like Dreamwidth import. It seems that automated backup to one's own hard drive would be similarly disallowed. They of course can't stop a manual scrape, but that's tedious. They are actively impeding users getting their own content out of the system for no good reason.
ETA: I can be held liable for things that are not under my control. If you get a lot of views, they do...something; I can't tell what but it seems to involve government reporting. Now I don't anticipate writing something that would somehow become wildly popular, but ordinary people can have things go unexpectedly viral. I've seen it plenty of times. I'm not going to bet that it couldn't possibly happen to me.

I do not plan to accept the new LJ terms of service. This breaks crossposting from Dreamwidth, so I hope that my LJ-only friends will find their way here. If you are an LJ user and reading this then please, even if you don't plan to migrate, back up your content somewhere. It takes five minutes to create a DW account and start an import. If you never use the account again, you've still protected your content should LJ delete your account. (Which they do sometimes if someone with unacceptable politics comes to their attention.) I hope you'll start using DW (you can crosspost if you still want to publish on LJ) and that you'll let me know you're here. (For example, by subscribing to my journal, which I'll notice.)

I'm planning to reduce my LJ footprint, selectively deleting entries there. (Everything is here.) I might end up deleting everything, but there are some published links to individual posts that I need to fix somehow, so I'm not just dropping a nuke right now.

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shopping is hard; let's go...

2017-02-19T21:19:57Z

Me: What do we need, that is available from Amazon, that costs $4.02?
Dani: Is this what's known as a first-world problem?
Me: Not the most egregious I've seen, but yeah.

Free shipping: modifying buyer behavior since...whenever they started that. But it works because of their enormous catalogue; you can find something to fill out an order. (For personal orders this is pretty much never a problem, but I was buying house stuff and thus using shared money.)

(This post is a minimal test of Dreamwidth's Markdown support. Let's see what happens.)

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Dreamwidth accounts vs. LJ OpenID accounts: check your subscription and access lists

2017-01-06T03:21:13Z

A lot of us now have OpenID accounts at Dreamwidth, which means we can log in to Dreamwidth using a Livejournal credential. This allows a Dreamwidth user to give a Livejournal user access to locked posts. These IDs are of the form "name.livejournal.com". For example, here is mine.

A lot of us also have native Dreamwidth accounts, which we log into with our Dreamwidth passwords and use to post entries. For example, here is mine.

These are not the same account.

That means that if you've granted access to "somebody.livejournal.com" (OpenID), but haven't granted access to "somebody" (Dreamwidth account), then "somebody" while logged in on Dreamwidth won't see your locked posts. Similarly, if you've subscribed to "somebody.livejournal.com", that doesn't mean you're going to see "somebody"'s posts in your feed. So if you want to read and grant access to your migrating LJ friends on Dreamwidth, you need to match up the accounts.

Currently, 32 people have granted access to "cellio.livejournal.com". Most of them have not granted access to "cellio", which means I won't see those posts. Maybe that's intentional (hey, intentions change; I'm not offended), but maybe it's unintentional.

I have two requests of my LJ friends:

1. If we're not connected there, and assuming you want to be, please add my Dreamwidth account to whatever lists you think appropriate. When I see email about new subscriptions/access, I check to make sure I've done the same. (If I've somehow missed you, please let me know. If I subscribed to you on LJ I want to do so on DW too.)

2. If you are not planning to use your LJ account to read posts on Dreamwidth, because you have a native account and will be reading that way, please let me know so I can remove your LJ account from my access lists. This isn't about not trusting you; this is about being able to manage my filters more easily -- if you're not using it anyway, I'd rather not be carrying it. Plus, you know, closing unnecessary security gaps.

Yeah, migration is a hassle. We'll get it sorted out.

Thanks!

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Dreamwidth and Livejournal OpenIDs

2016-12-29T14:09:28Z

If you've ever commented in a journal (like mine) that's ever been imported to Dreamwidth, then Dreamwidth has a stub pseudo-account with your name on it, with a name of the form username.livejournal.com. This is, I presume, so that if you use your LiveJournal OpenID to log in to Dreamwidth, you'll be able to see protected entries and suchlike. If you have, or later create, a real Dreamwidth account, one from which you can post entries, you might want to reduce the clutter by merging the stub account into the real one. You can do that.

For those reading this on LJ, yes I want to make that link at the bottom better, including modifying it to show how many comments are already present on DW. Figuring out the regular expression requires more caffeine. Or maybe somebody who's already done it will share. Anyway, this is a work in progress.

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tap tap... is this thing on?

2016-12-29T02:47:05Z

I'm posting this from Dreamwidth, with hopes that it will also show up on LJ. Let's find out.

One of the things you can't import to Dreamwidth is memories. It seems I have rather a few of them. A lot of them are to organize my own content (in ways that are orthogonal to tagging). It'd be really spiffy if there were some way to take my LJ memories, find the corresponding entries on DW at least in my own journal, and create those memories on the DW side. Any ideas on how to do that?

As a baseline, I guess I can save each page of memories as HTML and edit them together into one page for local access. Or stick it on the web somewhere, or something. That at least preserves the information, though with LJ links.

Oh hey, tagging is different here on DW -- no auto-completions or drop-down list to choose from. Hmm.

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Monica

signal boost: if you are using Dreamwidth from Russia, please read

merging access filters?

SCA people: find your friends

LJ users: claim your imported comments

LJ to Dreamwidth in a hurry (5 minutes)

LiveJournal terms of service

shopping is hard; let's go...

Dreamwidth accounts vs. LJ OpenID accounts: check your subscription and access lists

Dreamwidth and Livejournal OpenIDs

*tap* *tap*... is this thing on?

tap tap... is this thing on?