Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in LiveJournal News' LiveJournal:

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Wednesday, November 27th, 2002
1:08 am [jproulx]	Taking it in a different direction. Earlier this morning we stopped taking requests in the "customization" category of the support department, in an effort to alleviate some of the pressures of offering such a broad range of support. However, we're not ditching support for customization type inquiries. We'll just be taking it in a different direction: We're going to be expanding our current documentation and we'll be encouraging everyone to help out by contributing their ideas and design talents. LiveJournal members will be able to get involved and contribute to our knowledge base much in the same way you can volunteer for the support or documentation departments. The howto journal will house more tutorials than ever, and will quickly become the definitive resource for customization purposes. With S2 right around the corner (which is closer than you might think), we will hopefully have a vast resource of nifty customization information compiled and available for everyone to use. (24 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 13th, 2002
2:50 am [jproulx]	Looking for communities? As some of you may be aware, there is an officially sanctioned community, community_promo, which allows LiveJournals users to run promotions for both the communities they maintain, and the communities they like the best. It is a great place to spread the word about your favorite communities, and to learn about some of the more obscure ones that slip under the radar. However, there's another great place like community_promo that'll help you find some great communities. I'd like to announce the recently sanctioned resource community_quest, a community where you can post and try to find communities that already exist. Try it out! Its run by the same maintainer as community_promo, and is quickly becoming the most popular way to find what you're looking for. Its the 411 of LiveJournal communities! (39 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, November 7th, 2002
2:08 pm [jproulx]	Security Notice Some of you might receive (or have already received) an email that says the sender is webmaster@livejournal.com, with a message containing the following paragraph: LiveJournal.com has been experiencing some technical difficulties with some of our member's live journals. The only way for us to fix the problem, Is for you to log into your account ASAP! Please log into your account here http://www.livejournal.com/ Please disregard this email, as it is just a hoax trying to scare users into giving out their passwords. The link in the message body doesn't actually take you to livejournal.com, but to a page on another server that looks exactly like our home page. If you log in from the false page, you risk having the security of your LiveJournal account becoming compromised. We're contacting the services involved in hosting the false page, and we hope to get this taken care of soon. (77 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 1st, 2002
8:28 pm [bradfitz]	More Updates Here are some updates on the previous updates, and some more... Permanent Accounts All 200 sold within a few days, but we kept it open for a week since the purchase rate had slowed down a bunch after the first couple days and we'd told people over email it'd probably be up for at least a week. Servers The company we bought the defective servers from wants $300 each to fix them, and they're being extremely slow and unintelligible in their correspondence. So, we're trying to return them now, then we'll get things from a different vendor. We should've had these things up and running a long, long time ago. Trust us, we're as frustrated dealing with these problems as you are with the site being slow. And we also all use LiveJournal, so that's, umm... twice the frustration. We'll keep you updated on the status. Photo Hosting We got a couple people working on making pretty styles, but progress is slow. There's not much I can do to speed this process up but crack the whip or beg. Well, actually, we're working on server setup documentation to get more developers installing the software and making styles. Account renaming The account renaming service is back: http://www.livejournal.com/rename/ Sorry it went away for so long. But it's all automated now, and everything's done correctly now. We're still charging the $15 fee, though, just so people aren't renaming all the time. (107 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, September 23rd, 2002
2:09 pm [bradfitz]	Updates Some quick updates... Permanent Accounts We're selling another batch of permanent accounts: http://www.livejournal.com/paidaccounts/permanent.bml We do this every 6 months or so, whenever people start mailing us a bunch asking when the next sale is. Read the page linked above for details. Servers Lately the site's kinda slow during peak hours because four servers we recently ordered were defective. One was physically bad, and the other three had a SCSI card, RAID card, and motherboard that weren't compatible with each other. When we get those back from the vendor fixed, we'll have more than enough database power for awhile. We're pretty disappointed that the vendor told us the machines went through testing, when they obviously didn't. Once school starts everywhere, load will pick up a bunch. We'll be adding some new webservers ahead of time to be ready for that. (luckily, with hardware as simple as a webserver, it's hard for a vendor to mess up the configuration) Photo Hosting The last few months I've been working on a new project, fotobilder, which is yet another photo management site, but designed to be easily customizable, highly scalable, and integrate with other sites. It's mostly done now, but needs to be prettied-up before its release. When that's done, LiveJournal users with paid accounts will get so much free disk space and bandwidth at pics.livejournal.com. (Details yet to be decided.) In addition to hosting full-sized pictures, you'll also be able to host more userpics. (more than the limit of 10) If you're a web designer with free time and at least some experience doing OO-programming, you should join the fotobilder community and help us make pretty layouts. And yes, I know we've talked about doing photo hosting for many years now. In the past I never did it because it was too large of a project to just cram into LiveJournal as some sub-feature. I didn't want the use of journalling or photo hosting to necessitate the use of the other. Making it an entirely separate site (picpix.com), but heavily integrated solves the problem. More details on this as we get closer to a launch date. (86 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, August 8th, 2002
1:22 pm [bradfitz]	New login system About 20 minutes ago we put live the new login system. Because it uses a new cookie format, everybody got logged out. Sure enough, three bugs were reported immediately. (And each of them a few hundred times, no less.) We do test this stuff for quite awhile before putting it live, but a half million testers is always better than 20. Anyway, bugs are fixed, and as the first one was serious, we logged everybody out again. That's why it seems that you can't stay logged in. Sorry, things should stabilize soon here. There are lots of advantages to the new login system which make this half hour of pain worth it. (446 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, August 5th, 2002
12:31 pm [bradfitz]	Say hello to alanj! We've got a new LiveJournal employee... say hello to alanj! Alan's been using LiveJournal for ages and did a ton of work making the code easily usable for other sites when it was first open-sourced a couple years back. Right now I try to be the lead programmer, sysadmin, and business guy, in addition to working on a new project. It's just too much. As a result, I've been neglecting certain responsibilities due to time limitations. Alan's job is going to be gradually taking on a number of my responsibilities, leaving me more time to give love to the neglected areas, and be able to step back occasionally and see the big picture, deciding which areas need work. Anyway, if you suddenly start seeing him post more often in the various lj_* communities, now you'll know why. :-) (41 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, July 20th, 2002
10:05 pm [bradfitz]	Password security In the past week or so, the number of stolen accounts has been on the rise. The reason is that there are a number of "brute force" programs out there now to sit around for hours, trying to guess an account's password. So, what did we do to combat it? Three things: 1) We finished our rate-limiting framework and applied it towards failed logins. A brute force program is now severely limited in how fast it can try and guess your password. (Further, we can now see attacks happening in real-time and notify the ISP) 2) We implemented password quality checks throughout the site. When you login, you're now told if your password is easily guessable and tells you to go change it. Also, you can't change your password to something weak, and you can't create a new account with a weak password. We analyzed all the existing passwords, and a pathetic number are trivially brute-forceable. If you see the warning text, please, go change your password. 3) If your account is "hacked" in the future, or already has been, you can delete the hacker's email address, mail the changed password to your old one, and change your password. The trick to this was that there was never a tool for you to delete the hacker's password in the past. There is now: /tools/emailmanage.bml Best, it doesn't let the hacker delete your old email address. We'll continue to work on improving security. In the meantime, however, don't use "password" for your password. Thanks. :) (263 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 17th, 2002
12:32 pm [bradfitz]	Find a friend... If you have a paid account, you can now find friends who are popular with your friends, but who you do not list yourself: http://www.livejournal.com/friends/popwithfriends.bml Props to ellenlouise and evan for the idea, even though they'll probably both give me crap about not using 'whom' a couple times in that first sentence. Update: Heh, I messed up.... I had my userid hardcoded in there from testing instead of using the $remote user's userid. Try again! :) (91 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, July 14th, 2002
8:48 pm [bradfitz]	LiveJournal Singles Let the romancin' begin... http://www.livejournal.com/singles/ Update: There seems to be a lot of concern that this is evil, and it well might be. :) But... it's entirely opt-in evil, so don't worry. Just don't use it and all is well. (150 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, July 8th, 2002
4:27 pm [bradfitz]	LiveJournal as RSS/Syndication Aggregator I've been talking about it forever, but I finally added support to LiveJournal for adding RSS feeds as friends. For example: http://www.livejournal.com/users/slashdot/ http://www.livejournal.com/users/sweetcode/ http://www.livejournal.com/users/gomono/ http://www.livejournal.com/users/dotkde/ That's 4 websites I don't have to check anymore... I can just add them to my friends list. Two caveats: 1) This is a paid user tool. 2) I only did the back-end. avva will be working on the UI to let you create new LJ RSS accounts from RSS URLs. Right now, the 4 examples above I did by hand in the database. I'm sure there's room for improvement, but it's pretty good so far. Reply here with some popular sites' RSS feeds and I'll create accounts for them manually for people to enjoy before Avva's done with the front-end. Update: I'm working with the DeadJournal guy, getting them running the latest code. Once that happens, you'll be able to add DeadJournal friends to your LiveJournal friends list through this mechanism (since LJ exports RSS also) ... kinda hacky, but it'll work. New Accounts: http://www.livejournal.com/users/kuro5hin/ http://www.livejournal.com/users/linuxtoday/ http://www.livejournal.com/users/cert/ http://www.livejournal.com/users/memepool/ http://www.livejournal.com/users/plasticdotcom/ http://www.livejournal.com/users/jerkcity/ http://www.livejournal.com/users/theregister/ Final Update: I'm done for the day, and I probably won't catch back up with the threads here tomorrow, so any new accounts will have to wait until the front-end is done. (156 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, July 6th, 2002
2:02 am [jproulx]	Email Scam Alert There seems to be a new email scam targeting LiveJournal users, effectively asking them for their login information by visiting a URL that almost matches "livejournal.com". If you receive this email or any others bearing a similar resemblence, please disregard it entirely, and certainly do not click on the link provided. We do not delete accounts for simple inactivity. Dear LiveJournal user, We have recently noticed that you haven't updated your LiveJournal in awhile. If you would like to keep your LiveJournal account, you must sign in within the next 24 hours. You may sign in at: { link removed } Failure to sign in within the next 24 hours will result in account termination. If at all possible, please spread the word about ignoring this scam to other users that may not see this news post. (97 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 18th, 2002
9:43 am [bradfitz]	MEETUP International LiveJournal MEETUP Day is 35 days away! This site rules... LiveJournal Basically, the idea of meetup.com is to automagically take a bunch of people in a certain area interested in some topic (say, LiveJournal), and get them together in real life somewhere. Because real life can be pretty cool. I talked to the primary guy behind this site about the details of how it works, and it's just incredibly complex ... very impressive stuff. I'm going to be promoting MEETUP across LiveJournal (in a few places) because I think it's really cool, and I think the guy behind it is really cool. So if you think LiveJournal's sold out or something because you see what you think are cross-promotional things, just remember we're getting paid nothing for it. I'm promoting MEETUP because it's one of those sites that I would never start, because there's such a risk of failure ... it only has value if tons of people are using it, and people aren't going to use it unless other people are using it. So, this is my big push to help them out....go sign up for LiveJournal MEETUP day and meet some cool LiveJournal people in your area. (56 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 17th, 2002
3:54 pm [bradfitz]	Please, buy a paid account. Short Version: Please, buy a paid account. Paid users aren't limited to modem speeds and have no artificial delay. ( Long Version... ) (436 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 3rd, 2002
9:57 am [bradfitz]	Answers We didn't get to all 556 comments that were posted, but we read the top-level ones and replied to as many as we had time for: http://www.livejournal.com/news/2002-05-qa.bml Now that we have a little script to deal with this, maybe we'll do it more often. I'm leaving comments enabled on this post, but please don't flood us with 556 comments again..... that was fun, but we have work to do now! :-) (80 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 28th, 2002
11:32 am [bradfitz]	Q&A; Day Here's a fun idea... Post a question to the LiveJournal crew here about anything LiveJournal-related, and we'll answer tomorrow or the next day in news again where everybody can see it. We'll try to answer the most number of questions possible. Don't worry about duplicate questions... we'll be sure not to answer in duplicate. ;-) Note: this is different tech support, where you go if you have problems. This is for things you're just curious about, which I guess might include problems, but those might not be as interesting to answer. We'll see. Bring on the questions! (573 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 24th, 2002
2:15 pm [bradfitz]	Friends of Friends Another treat for users with paid accounts .... There's now a "friends of friends" view in addition to your "friends" view. The friends of friends view shows you people that are friends of your friends, but are not also your friends. It's a good way to discover new interesting people. Just add another "friends" after friends in your friends view address, like so: http://bradfitz.livejournal.com/friendsfriends Enjoy! And buy a paid account and support us. :-P P.S. We still have a bunch of servers not yet setup. My bad. I've been side-tracked on other projects. I'll get to those this weekend. (123 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 22nd, 2002
6:11 pm [bradfitz]	Domain aliasing I added a fun little feature last night, because the new code made it so easy to support. You can now register a domain name and make it load your LiveJournal. For example, I'll pick on my homeboy mart ... he setup this domain: http://martlj.2y.net/ It may be the ugliest looking domain name in the world, but it loads his LiveJournal now! And you can do it now too (well, if you have a paid account). I set it up for my personal journal too, but we'll leave that unlinked. :-) ( Instructions... ) (72 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 17th, 2002
5:56 pm [bradfitz]	Good News Tons of wonderful news... (and well, a little sad news) New servers! We got 7 new servers this week. We're still setting a few of them up but in summary we got: 4 new web servers, a new site master db to replace the older over-powered pre-cluster one (which will get a new job), a new cluster1 master and cluster1 slave, since those machines only had 2 GB of memory before (their max). New architecture! We've moved from FastCGI to mod_perl. I've been meaning to do this for ages, but while I was in school I always had more important things to do. It turned out to be incredibly simple, probably because I'd been preparing for it for years. Now we don't have to do guess-work balancing FastCGI process counts or trust FastCGI's dynamic mode. Along with lingerd, things be totally rockin'. But... some nodes are still in the process of being converted. See next section. No disks! All our web nodes (all 14+) will shortly be booting and operating entirely from the network, without harddrives, because they suck. So far only a few are doing this, but adding more is trivial: just add to a file IP address, ethernet MAC address, and server role. (But I'm tired after a week of work in the NOC, so I'll finish later) So what's this all mean? Tons more speed, and it's a ton easier for us to manage. By next week sometime everything new should be fully setup, then we can get back to fun things. (well, things that are fun for you) Update: I forgot the sad part. We're getting rid of our South Park server names since 1) we pretty much ran out of names, and 2) they were a bitch to remember and type. New names are like gm (global master), gs1 (global slave 1), c01m (cluster 1 master), c02s2 (cluster 2 slave 2), w14 (web 14), and m2 (misc 2). Betyacareeh? :) (44 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 10th, 2002
4:57 pm [bradfitz]	Beta testing, continued. I posted earlier about the current beta-test/bughunt. Here's the status so far: [X] :89 redir -- opiummmm [X] spell check -- rhiannonstone [X] userpics sporadic -- bradfitz, dixie [X] cached closures/scoping -- dixie [X] /community/ URI -- opiummm [X] get_query_string -- brokenwish [ ] export broken -- opiummmm, 1000101 [X] INERR had invalid {S} flag -- darksoul [?] userinfo garbage at top -- rhiannonstone [X] portal selectall_hashref -- sirthorn [?] can't use _CODE as hashref -- saveyoursanity [X] talkread closure problem -- saveyoursanity Keep testing. Things are seeming pretty good now. If there was a problem you reported earlier not on my list, it was probably a symptom of a problem and it's on my list above said differently. But re-check, and see if it's fixed. Thanks! (41 Comments |Comment on this)