cellio | Entries tagged with dreamwidth

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.

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?

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.)

Crossposts: http://cellio.livejournal.com/1066758.html

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!

Crossposts: http://cellio.livejournal.com/1063027.html

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.

Crossposts: http://cellio.livejournal.com/1062181.html

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.

Crossposts: http://cellio.livejournal.com/1061767.html

I have seen credible reports that the LiveJournal servers have been moved to Moscow, where they are now subject to Russian rather than US law. This does not give me warm fuzzy feelings for LJ's already-shaky future.

I've had an account on Dreamwidth, a site very similar to LJ (they forked the LJ code way back when) for as long as they've existed. I think highly of them, but for "social" reasons I haven't used it for posting, only reading, until now. I'm going to be changing that. My intention is to make DW my primary journal and mirror posts to LJ for as long as I have LJ-based readers.

The first step of this transition is to migrate my existing content. Some of it's there already (I tried this in 2012), but I need to refresh it. Migration involves giving the DW migrator tool my LJ username and password so it can fetch all my entries rather than just the public ones. I would prefer a client I can run locally that I use to log in to both sites, but it doesn't exist. I am told that the DW tool uses challenge/response authentication, which sends a combined MD5 hash of the password (does not send in the clear). Nonetheless, in theory the DW migration code could use that credential to see locked posts to which I have access from some of you, so: if you are concerned about that possibility, you should unfriend me here at LJ at least temporarily. I am not concerned about this possibility for myself as other people migrate, for what that's worth, but I am not you. I intend to file the migration request tonight, but in the past, migrations prompted by LJ issues have had long wait times and I'm late to this party, so it might not start for hours or days after I submit it.

I'm sorry for the short notice. I really should have figured out the "import, then DW primary and mirrored to LJ" thing a while back, as some of you have, but I haven't. I didn't want to split my community, with some interactions coming via LJ and others via DW, and I've casually observed that comment volume goes down when people have to click through to another site. I don't yet know if I'll direct comments only to DW because of that; I do value the interactions here. We'll see. DW now has good OpenID support, meaning you can log in there to post comments using your LJ credentials, so maybe that'll work out. Or of course you could create an account there (and let me know who you are so I can add you to access lists for my infrequent non-public posts).

You can find me on DW at http://cellio.dreamwidth.org/.

Lately, every time LJ pushes a new update they break legibility and accessibility a little more. This is becoming a problem. It's beyond my ability to correct with browser adaptations.

One of the reasons I haven't moved over to DreamWidth is that a lot of the people I interact with are still here. I'm concerned that y'all might not comment as much if I went there (you can log in with OpenID, but that may be a barrier to some), and the discussions in comments are a lot of the value of LJ to me. I don't need to post my stuff out into the silent void for my own amusement.

If I move there, then I could use Dreamwidth's cross-poster to post entries here too (to make it easy on my remaining LJ readers). Doing that requires giving DW my LJ password, which might cause some people to want to remove me from some or all of their filters, an outcome I don't want. (You're not just trusting me any more; you're trusting DW.) Since you all aren't moving to DW with me, I'd still need to come here to read the LJ-only people; what access would the cross-poster cost me?

So, poll time!

[Poll #1902385]

I've been seeing more spam on my LJ entries than usual in recent weeks, but most of it is posted anonymously and gets auto-screened, so nobody else sees it. Two days ago I started getting the following message from LJ accounts that were presumably created just to post these comments (on, I assume, as many journals as possible as quickly as possible):

"Hey This is hard for me because I have never done anything like this.. but I have a huge crush on you. I have never been able to tell you for reasons which you would quickly identify as obvious if you knew who this was. I'm really attracted to you and I think you would be wanting to get with *Read FULL Card Here* [URL removed]"

These ones, coming from logged-in accounts, do show up (about 15 so far). I really don't want to have to start screening comments from people not on my subscription list; I prefer to be more open. (I didn't like having to screen the anonymous ones, but the spammers left me no choice.) I've been marking these as spam when I delete them, which blocks that particular LJ account from commenting on my journal again, but it would appear that creating bogus accounts is easy enough that the spammers don't care. This probably means that more-challenging captchas are in our future. (I struggle with them already.)

The pattern of attack is different, by the way. The anonymous spammers tend to latch onto the same three or four old posts to hit; this current wave is hitting random posts with, so far, no duplicates.

In semi-related news, I've seen no update on the journal-import problem over at Dreamwidth (entries come across fine, but comments don't). I've started to read regularly there in addition to here, so if you're there too and I haven't found you yet, please get in touch.

Update: I discovered that I can do something less severe than screening comments from non-friends: I can make them answer a captcha. Sorry, legitimate non-friends, but I'm going to see if this deters the bots.

Update #2: The captcha doesn't seem to be slowing them down, so either the spammers are humans, the spam-bots are good at captchas, or... the setting isn't working. Could somebody do me a favor? I'd like somebody who is not on my friends list to post a comment (while signed in, not anonymous) here and tell me if you got a captcha. Thanks!

You may have seen that monstrosity of a reading page they're getting ready to unleash on everybody. (If not, click on the link in the blue banner at the top of your reading page.) In a nutshell, they're getting rid of individual-journal styling for the reading page. The new style does not work for me. Profoundly.

But that's not the main thing I wanted to post about. I've had an unused journal at Dreamwidth all along, so between this and the fact that LJ backups have been broken for a year or so (that is, I can no longer back up my journal to my own machine), I decided to import my journal to DW (keeping all the security groups, of course). Before doing so I changed my LJ password to a temporary one, and then changed it back again when the import finished 37 minutes later (wow, fast!).

That's how I found out that my original LJ password no longer meets their password requirements. It's not too simple; it's too complicated. Apparently the system is perfectly capable of storing and applying a password containing assorted punctuation characters, because I've been doing that for a while, but the "change password" form will no longer accept any punctuation. Letters and numbers, folks. How 20th-century.

Really, LJ? Security means that little to you?

Edit: I think I've got something adequate now. The indentation of comments in threads isn't quite as clear as I'd like, but it'll do. It's the price I have to pay for a legible font. Thanks everyone! Suggestions for ways to improve this are still welcome, but it's not as urgent as it was. (This wasn't how I wanted to spend my evening. Thanks LJ...) End edit.

Thanks for all the comments on the previous entry. I've read them and tried the suggested changes and for some reason I can't view my journal in other styles using the standard URL settings. Bizarre. Also, I tried posting what follows by email and it didn't show up; if it does later, please ignore it.

I chose the style for my journal and reading page because it has two important properties. First, it maximizes the space spent on actual content, omitting stuff like sidebar links, calendars, indented text with outdented userpics, and so on. I don't care about that and I don't want to give up the real-estate. Second, it isolates individual entries, so one humongous picture or ultra-long link doesn't hose the entire page, only that entry on it. (I think the relevant implementation detail here is the use of tables. Not sure.) Anyway, it actually took some digging to accomplish those two simple goals, many years ago; most of the styles available at the time I did this were "artistic" and IMO unusable.

That style's handling of individual-entry pages is poor. It doesn't show nesting for comments (essential!), and if I recall correctly it doesn't show userpics (also pretty important). So while I use a custom style for my journal, I've checked the "use the site default" option for individual entries to get around those problems. That doesn't give me the colors I want, but it'll do.

Now that style is broken. :-(

So far as I'm aware, I cannot set one style for journal/reading pages and another one for individual entries. So if the site default no longer works I need a single style that works everywhere. There may well now be such a style; it'll take many hours crawling through the gazillions of LJ styles to try to find out.

Does anybody happen to know a style that meets all of the following requirements?

For journal and reading pages:

Uses most of the browser width for entry content (no sidebars/multi-column layouts).
Prevents one wide entry from messing up the whole page.
Shows poster userpics.
Has, or can be configured with, a reasonable font size and face. My current style is fine.
Lets me change colors (I think they all do?).

For individual-entry pages:

Has, or can be configured with, a reasonable font size and face. The old site default is fine.
Threads comments.
Shows poster and commenter userpics.
Makes all the functionality you'd expect (like editing comments) available.

I don't care about S1 versus S2; I just want something that works, ideally without spending a bazillion hours learning the LJ style system and hacking something to fit. Any ideas?

Many thanks!

OK, why is it that Firefox is giving me 502 (bad gateway) from LJ and asserting that it's them, not me, but I can access the site from Safari running on the same machine? I don't particularly want to use Safari; all my usability improvements are already set up in Firefox.

(I guess I should mention that I'm also on Dreamwidth with this user name, but I haven't been posting there so far.)

Facebook doesn't have a monopoly on doing funky things with privacy; LJ is at it too. For those not clicking through: you can now have LJ automatically cross-post your entries and comments, including comments made on other people's locked entries, to other sites. Sometimes comments reveal context even without the original entry being available. That strikes me as problematic, because we are not all completely careful all of the time.

So just to clarify:

1. I do not have Facebook or Twitter accounts.

2. I don't knowingly violate others' trust; if you locked it I'm not going to leak it. I have this "feature" turned off.

3. While I realize that anything on the net isn't really secure and I take that into account when posting, I do occasionally post locked entries. I do so with the expectation that such information will stay here. Please respect that.

I know some of my friends are talking about migrating to Dreamwidth. I staked out a journal there when they started last year. Thus far I haven't done anything with it, but if you're there please feel free to let me know. As more people migrate it becomes a higher priority to read a subscription list there, too.

Dreamwidth is an LJ-like site that entered open beta a few days ago. I'm there. I don't know how I'll use the account yet. I have a permanent account here on LJ so I'm not planning to go anywhere, but every time LJ has a kerfuffle I wonder what my fallback plan is, and Dreamwidth seems to be the winner there. It's run by ex-LJ people and seems to be a throwback to the ideals of early LJ, before the sale to Six Apart and then to SUP and the layoff of most of the staff. And they're fixing some of the suboptimal aspects of LJ, like the mingling of subscription and access rights into the ill-named "friend" relation.

I know a lot of my friends are setting up accounts there. Please let me know you're there.

It looks like Dreamwidth supports reading from LJ via OpenID. Does anyone know how to do the reverse? If some of my friends move to DW (as opposed to just mirroring there), what I'd really like to do is read their DW posts on my LJ reading page, using either my DW cookie (since I've got one) or my LJ OpenID. I have the vague impression that this sort of thing almost works. Can someone explain how?

A reminder to people who are moving there: if you give DW your LJ password so they can import your journal, you are compromising not only your own security (your choice) but also that of everyone who posts locked entries to which you have access. Be careful out there, ok?

Thanks to

mamadeb I now have a Dreamwidth account. (I won't have time to set it up until after yom tov, so no content yet, but if you're there too, feel free to connect.)

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?

migration to Dreamwidth commencing soon

LJ -> DW? (poll)

sock-puppets R us

latest LJ fail

seeking an LJ style

LJ failures

LJ and privacy

Dreamwidth

Dreamwidth

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