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

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Thursday, July 8th, 2004
3:22 pm [bradfitz]	Paid user "express lane" New paid user feature! If you're logged in as a paid user, you "cut in line" of other web requests that we've received but not yet generated a response for. So our load balancer retrieves all incoming web requests immediately after your browser sends them, then sorts those requests into two lines: free users and paid users. Whenever a real server (not the load balancer) is ready to do more work, it always fulfills a request from the paid user line, and only does free user requests once no paid users are waiting. We've had this done for a couple weeks, but just put it live today. We were going to wait to announce it until we had the cool part done, but thought it best you all know what's up. The cool part is: we're going to make the load balancer tell the real servers how many seconds/milliseconds you saved by cutting in line and how many people you cut in front of, and then the real servers will add that to the response, so you can do "View Source" in your browser and at the top it'll show you those stats, so you can verify it's working. This is all different from what we did a few years ago, which was to have "free servers" and "paid servers". Instead all the servers do both free and paid, but access to the servers is prioritized by your account type. Here are some stats of it in action: queues web_proxy-normal.age 0 web_proxy-normal.count 3 web_proxy-highpri.age 0 web_proxy-highpri.count 0 . queues web_proxy-normal.age 0 web_proxy-normal.count 0 web_proxy-highpri.age 0 web_proxy-highpri.count 0 . queues web_proxy-normal.age 0 web_proxy-normal.count 4 web_proxy-highpri.age 0 web_proxy-highpri.count 0 . queues web_proxy-normal.age 1 web_proxy-normal.count 4 web_proxy-highpri.age 0 web_proxy-highpri.count 0 . queues web_proxy-normal.age 0 web_proxy-normal.count 3 web_proxy-highpri.age 0 web_proxy-highpri.count 0 . queues web_proxy-normal.age 0 web_proxy-normal.count 5 web_proxy-highpri.age 0 web_proxy-highpri.count 0 . At the top it showed there were 3 free users (waiting for less than a second --- age 0) waiting to get responses, and 0 paid users. Then it was all clear, then 4 new free users were waiting, then waiting up to a second, then those cleared, and 3 new free users were waiting under a second. Then 5 later, still under a second. But throughout, no paid users were ever waiting. Obviously the above isn't an interesting demo of this feature, but next time we hit a hiccup and the site gets slow, the paid users will be affected the least, since you won't have to wait in line long for a page to be generated. (just have to wait for paid users that came before you) (216 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 7th, 2004
4:10 pm [jproulx]	Paid Time Reimbursement Offer If you bought a 6 or 12 month paid account between 2004-06-30 & 2004-07-07 and your payment has cleared, you'll have until 2004-07-20 to claim your 2 months of free time. You're still eligible even if you paid with a check or money order, as long as you placed your order between 2004-06-06 & 2004-07-07 and your payment clears by 2004-07-20. Orders must be placed before midnight tonight (Update: GMT). Alternatively, the 2 week reimbursement option will remain available until 2004-07-20. This only applies to paid users who had paid time between 2004-06-01 & 2004-06-30, even if it has expired. (184 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 30th, 2004
5:58 pm [jproulx]	Paid Time Reimbursement In light of the rough periods we've experienced during the past couple of weeks, outgrowing our network topology & being attacked in a Distributed Denial of Service, we thought it only fair to give back some of your paid time. Those of you who had a paid account during the month of June are eligible for an instant 2 weeks of free service, even if your paid account has since expired. Alternatively, if you have plans to purchase 6 or 12 months of service during the next week, you're eligible to receive 2 additional months of service for free. Both offers can be found for the next 7 days on the Paid Time Reimbursement page, and they apply to any eligible account you manage (communities, etc). We apologize for the recently spotty service, but as always we're working hard to overcome these challenges. We'd like to clarify that the 2 month option is only available for payments that have been fully processed, so it can take a while for the reimbursement page to update with the proper option. If you only see the 2 week option on the reimbursement page, either refresh the page or wait until your payment has totally cleared (Our credit card processing should be instant, but PayPal payments can sometimes take hours to clear). Note: We're still running into some issues checking for accounts that have expired in the past month, and there are still some instances where people are getting "you are ineligible" errors. We're working as fast as we can to fix these problems, so please be patient. I'll update this post again when I have more information. Update: We've made a couple of changes for eligibility checks, so if you were getting the "you are ineligible" error before you should try again. (710 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 25th, 2004
9:30 am [bradfitz]	More post-by-phone numbers... New PhonePost numbers: http://www.livejournal.com/phonepost/numbers.bml New entries include: Long Beach, CA Anaheim, CA San Diego, CA Biloxi, MS Jackson, MS San Antonio, TX More on their way, I'm told, possibly today. We have no control over these, short of begging for more, which VoicePulse keeps providing as they grow into new areas. (287 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 23rd, 2004
6:08 pm [bradfitz]	mood theme editor Mood themes are finally easy to create/manage: http://www.livejournal.com/manage/moodthemes.bml (Which has always been a paid-user perk, but never easy to use....) (169 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, March 25th, 2004
10:22 am [jproulx]	Post by Phone Access Numbers In a couple of days we’ll be adding a new set of Post by Phone Access Numbers for the state of California. Our current VoIP service providers are also working on expanding their coverage into other west coast and midwest states over the next few weeks. (192 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 10th, 2004
12:15 pm [bradfitz]	friends popular with friends This toy is back: http://www.livejournal.com/friends/popwithfriends.bml It uses all our new fast stuff this time. Hopefully it holds up longer than it did last time. :-) (145 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 24th, 2003
11:54 pm [bradfitz]	Email snafu So, I understand there was a bug with the paid account expiration reminder system... People who had bought extra userpics were being notified of their upcoming expiration every 5 minutes, instead of just once. whitaker rushed a fix live. (We somehow missed this during testing of the extra userpic feature which is pretty new... :-/) Sorry if you were spammed by this. We would've got to it sooner, but we were all away doing the holiday thing. Anyway, hope everybody enjoys the holidays and new year, LJ spam aside. :-) (69 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, December 12th, 2003
10:50 pm [bradfitz]	Michigan PhonePost If you're in Michigan, we now have PhonePost numbers for you: http://www.livejournal.com/phonepost/numbers.bml#Michigan More states (and countries) on their way. (we have to work through other companies to add numbers, so we can't just add everywhere in the world with the drop of a hat.....) (156 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, November 15th, 2003
2:06 am [bradfitz]	455 phone numbers now available We've gone from 17 to 455 phone numbers available. They're all east coast still, but we're working on others. http://www.livejournal.com/phonepost/numbers.bml States covered: Connecticut | Delaware | Dist. of Columbia | Florida | Georgia | Maine | Maryland | Massachusetts | New Hampshire | New Jersey | New York | Pennsylvania | Rhode Island | Vermont | Virginia Mad props to the coolest phone company I've had the pleasure of working with: http://www.voicepulse.com/ Everybody should get a VoIP phone from them because they're cool. (I'm drooling at their "Filters" functionality....) Unfortunately I'm in Portland, OR, outside of their coverage area, so I can't get their service. Anyway, we're working on numbers in other parts of the world and the states. If you work at a phone company that can setup trunk numbers in your region to a VoIP/SIP/IAX connection on our end, get in contact with me at brad@danga.com . Enjoy! (279 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, November 13th, 2003
1:04 pm [bradfitz]	phone post numbers There are now 17 numbers available for phone posting: http://www.livejournal.com/phonepost/numbers.bml Naturally we don't have everywhere, but we'll work on adding more. Enjoy! (173 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, October 24th, 2003
4:29 pm [bradfitz]	posting by email In case anybody missed it, paid members can now post to LiveJournal via email: http://www.livejournal.com/~news/72431.html (58 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, September 22nd, 2003
10:23 am [bradfitz]	Centipix I was wondering if anybody had any experience, good or bad, with the use of Centipix for online payments? I'm wondering if paid users would like that as an option to pay, as an alternative to the existing options. (123 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, August 28th, 2003
4:59 am [evan]	paid-only styles Paid members now have access to two new paid-only styles. “Component” (s2component has discussion of advanced Component modifications.) “The Boxer” (This one is brand new!) To use either of these, go to the customize page and change to the new “S2” style system. (If you don’t like S2, you can go back to your old S1 style by visiting this page as well.) If you’re unfamiliar with S2, be sure to play around with the options on that page; there is a friendly editor that lets you easily customize various aspects (colors, the “comment” links, fonts) of your journal. (234 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, April 17th, 2003
5:17 pm [jproulx]	New Feature: Ping Weblogs.com By request we've added a new feature for paid members: the ability to ping Weblogs.com with updates of your public posts. (117 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 25th, 2003
5:59 pm [bradfitz]	Two questions sandy, mother/employee, is off in Mexico this week so I got the job of running to the PO Box and processing check payments. It got me thinking about payment related items.... Would those of you who prefer to pay by check/money order/cash be interested in getting a self-address envelope mailed to you a couple weeks before your expiration date, complete with renewal order number? All you'd have to do is include payment and a stamp? I figure the cost of two envelopes and a stamp is approximately the same as our credit card processing fees, and if it'd make it easier on you, why not? Poll #116855 Renewal Envelopes Open to: Friends, results viewable to: All If you pay by postal mail, would you like an automatic renewal order/envelope sent to you a couple weeks before your account expires? View Answers Yes 2374 (91.0%) No 235 (9.0%) (Comments also invited) Second question: Anybody experiencing problems with automatic renewal emails coming too late or not at all? We've had a few random complaints, but I'm not sure how big the problem is. Thanks! (and sorry this isn't a more interesting post... but whitaker starts his full-time LiveJournal internship in a week, and then we'll have double manpower on the hackin' front....) (134 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, March 2nd, 2003
2:16 am [jproulx]	Feature Priority (messed up the poll in the first post) As you are the people who ensure the survival of our service, we'd like to know what you think we should be dedicating our project time to. There are a few big projects in the works but only a handful of people to work on them, so what happens is our time gets stretched over all projects. So, if you're willing, please prioritize[1] the features you would like to see us working on the most: (Legend: 1: higher priority - 5: lower priority) Poll #107750 Feature Priority Open to: Friends, results viewable to: All Style System 2 (S2) View Answers Mean: 2.91 Median: 3 Std. Dev 1.44 1 756 (23.2%) 2 622 (19.1%) 3 676 (20.7%) 4 570 (17.5%) 5 636 (19.5%) Statistics Package/Service View Answers Mean: 2.88 Median: 3 Std. Dev 1.33 1 669 (20.5%) 2 636 (19.5%) 3 855 (26.2%) 4 633 (19.4%) 5 469 (14.4%) Local Friends Page Server View Answers Mean: 2.79 Median: 3 Std. Dev 1.32 1 656 (20.2%) 2 801 (24.7%) 3 790 (24.3%) 4 555 (17.1%) 5 446 (13.7%) Event Subscription Notification Service View Answers Mean: 3.00 Median: 3 Std. Dev 1.27 1 468 (14.4%) 2 743 (22.9%) 3 830 (25.6%) 4 729 (22.5%) 5 473 (14.6%) Other (please describe) View Answers If you entered something for "other", please weight your selection: View Answers Mean: 2.64 Median: 2 Std. Dev 1.76 1 295 (45.6%) 2 75 (11.6%) 3 40 (6.2%) 4 39 (6.0%) 5 198 (30.6%) ( Feature Definitions ) [1] Of course our highest priority is to ensure that the site is stable for all users, but that doesn't mean we can't devote time to our other projects as well. (175 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, December 11th, 2002
11:01 pm [jproulx]	Syndication Point Limits & syn_promo If you haven't noticed yet, we've raised the number of available syndication points, so you can add more syndicated accounts to your friends list than you could before. Also, there's a new community that's popped up for LiveJournal syndication discussions that you might want to check out — syn_promo is our newest official community. With syn_promo you can post about your favorite feeds, check out the full list of syndicated feeds, or just generally keep an eye on all of the new feeds that spring up. Check it out, join up, and find the interesting & cool feeds you've been missing out on! (48 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, October 14th, 2002
4:13 pm [bradfitz]	Paid user news Syndication LiveJournal's syndication (RSS, RDF) is much improved from the last announcement. You can now add your own RSS feeds and see other popular feeds: http://www.livejournal.com/syn/ It's not totally done, but it's getting there. Servers Apologies for the slowness. If you missed one of the recent news updates, we'd ordered new machines, got them, and they were all dead. We returned them to the vendor and ordered from somebody else. So that second order should be arriving this week. One of the six items already came. When that's all in (assuming it works, but it should), then we'll be good. (89 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, May 25th, 2002
11:05 pm [sherm]	New Paid Account Problem Hey folks, There appears to be a problem with our payment processing system that's causing some new paid accounts to get incorrectly created as free ones. This has been occurring for the last couple days, but I'd been busy with other matters and didn't notice the pattern until tonight. We're aware of this now, and will get it fixed as soon as possible. Please note that this only affects new account payments. If you've paid to upgrade or renew an existing account, everything should operate completely as normal. Also, absolutely no payment information has been lost -- this is just a small software problem that will be corrected. As always, we appreciate your patience.