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

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    Wednesday, January 5th, 2005
    9:03 pm
    [bradfitz]
    Big news... Six Apart and LiveJournal!
    Yes, the rumors are true!

    I've been dying to post about this but I haven't been able to until now. We just had to finish up the legal stuff and make sure everything was signed before we could make it all official.

    Six Apart bought LiveJournal!

    We're all psyched about this, and I know you guys all have some questions, so I'll try to preemptively answer them. Based on the comments we get, we'll be posting more and more clarification posts until everybody understands what's up.

    Who's Six Apart?
    If you've never ventured outside of LiveJournal land, it's possible you haven't heard of Six Apart, but more than likely you have... They're the company responsible for Movable Type (their weblogging product) and TypePad (their service). They're also a small company, but a bit bigger than Danga (that's us), and with more direction.

    What does this mean for LiveJournal?
    Nothing earth-shattering. LiveJournal development and support will continue, and will probably even accelerate, as we grow the team. We'll continue to work on speed, reliability, and new features.

    LiveJournal won't become paid-user-only or anything crazy like that. We're not going to raise prices. We're not going to cancel permanent accounts, etc, etc. And we're not going to spam or sell your information. You own your journals, not us. Really you shouldn't see any negative changes.

    The most immediate changes will be that we'll start to get prettier... more styles, themes, etc. Six Apart is really good at that and we're not.

    What happens to the Danga employees?
    We're moving to San Francisco! *ding ding*

    Why is Danga selling LiveJournal?
    I love technology and designing the LiveJournal architecture but I hate running a business. While I've been learning a lot of business stuff over the past 5 years and it's been kinda interesting, I just don't love it and I'm not great at it. Plus it just keeps getting harder as LiveJournal grows, sucking away more of my time and youth. I'm ready to pass off what I see as "the boring stuff" to somebody else that I trust and focus on the fun stuff.

    Also, Six Apart has a lot of staff that we don't... marketing, designers, usability people, etc. It's been frustrating the past few years knowing that in a number of ways LiveJournal is technically the best but because we weren't the prettiest and didn't give good quote, we were often overlooked. I want that to change ... we'll continue to focus on technology and they'll help us make our stuff pretty and usable. They want LiveJournal to stay LiveJournal and that's why I picked Six Apart.

    Do you trust them?
    I totally trust Six Apart.

    Ever since LiveJournal got big and popular, a number of companies have been offering to buy LiveJournal. I suppose it was inevitable, but the more I talked to everybody, the less interested I became in selling. With a few exceptions, nobody seemed to "get it", and people's ideas for LiveJournal's future were generally lame. I started to realize that selling LiveJournal would mean killing LiveJournal, so I didn't. Then one day Six Apart contacts us, we start talking, and here we are. I know you may not necessarily trust me when I say they're a cool company, but I'd ask at least that you give them a chance before you start rioting in the streets. I have a lot of confidence that this union will produce cool things.

    Ben and Mena, the founders of Six Apart, have built a great company and hand-picked a lot of great people. Over the past couple months I've come to know their executive team really well, and they're people I feel confident taking over control of my baby. They've already shown that they'll defer to me on issues of community, fearful of doing anything that'd upset people. As for the rest of the team, I've only started meeting them all, but my mouth hit the floor when I saw some of the latest stuff they have in the works.

    If you want to run for the hills and backup your journal and move to another service, feel free, but hopefully you'll be back in 6 months when we've proven ourselves.

    Why didn't you just grow LiveJournal more and/or hire your own management team?
    Easier said than done. Finding a good management team is next to impossible... I couldn't find anybody I'd trust as much as Six Apart. Most people that approach you and say, "Hey, I'd like to manage your company" are really just in it for money. I wanted a group of people that understood what I'd built and appreciated it for what it was, not what it could be if it could only extract more money from its users.

    So in the end I realized Six Apart was just what I was looking for. Plus having a bigger pool of co-workers is more fun and more productive.

    Why is Six Apart buying LiveJournal?
    Lots of reasons:
    • Our companies are more alike than different.
    • We both use Perl.
    • Together we form super robot that's stronger than the sum of its parts.
    • Super robots can fight super companies.
    • They respect us, we respect them.
    • We have a number of features they don't.
    • We have experience with making "inward-facing" community sites, whereas their sites/products tend to be "outward-facing". They want some of that inward-facing action.
    • Because we're awesome.
    What would be more interesting is why they're NOT buying LiveJournal: they're not buying the site to spam you, screw you, destroy the community, or convert you en massé to their other paid services. They just want to double our efforts and have a part in all types of blogging.

    Does this mean LiveJournal will finally get TrackBack support?
    I just knew somebody would ask this!

    Yes, LiveJournal will get TrackBack. Actually we'd been planning it anyway, and we've even done a partial implementation recently. This kinda bumps up its priority though. :-)

    In all fairness, there have been a number of TrackBack patches written for the LiveJournal codebase in the past, but none that were usable or scalable enough to run on the main site. Our new version was designed from the beginning to scale.

    Are prices changing?
    Nope.

    That'd be silly and anger people unnecessarily. We want you guys to keep using the site and remain happy.

    Do I have to now use TypePad or Movable Type?
    No. We're not migrating you or anything like that.

    Why is the TOS and privacy policy changing?
    Our old TOS and privacy policies apparently sucked, from a lawyer point-of-view. We never had lawyers create or really even review the old ones... they were just a hodge-podge of misc lawyer-sounding things people had collected over time. A lot of the things that were changed are actually now better for the users. We just needed to clean things up.

    Our goal isn't to really change anything with the new documents... just make them legally correct.

    We're putting up the new documents now so you have time to review them and compare them to the old ones. In a few days (to be determined) you'll be required to agree to the new Terms of Service before logging in or posting, etc. Sorry for the inconvenience ... it's a lawyer thing.

    Why is social contract changing to guiding principles?
    Lawyers didn't like "contract" in the name "social contract" because it does not have the structure of a contract. The principles are the same, though. Six Apart doesn't want to kill LiveJournal. Don't worry --- I thoroughly screened them to make sure they weren't evil.

    Why do I have to agree to the new Terms of Service before I can post to my LiveJournal?
    We just need to make sure everything is on the level. If you have questions about the changes, we'll answer them.

    What happened to my account? It seems like it was suspended?
    If LiveJournal has conflicting info about your age in your account (it appears different in two places) you need to authorize your account to prove you're over 13 or have your parents' permission to keep a LiveJournal. In the past we did not allow anyone under the age of 13 to have a LiveJournal. Now you can have one even if you are under 13 but because of Federal Law you must get your parents' permission.

    Will my permanent account be honored?
    Of course! Your permanent account is permanent.

    What does this mean for the future business plans of LiveJournal?
    We feel that there's a lot of synergy between our two companies and we both benefit from this relationship by bringing a lot of value-add to the table. By focusing on our core competencies we can continue to provide robust, turn-key, industry-leading solutions while also lowering Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) to our valued clients.

    (P.S. The above is all gibberish. Any time I hear any of those words I completely fall asleep and attempt to eat off my own ears. Six Apart did not say any of those words to me.)

    Does this mean I get free TypePad and MT?
    Naah, no plans for that. They're seperate and isolated. Maybe down the road there will be some promo or something, but that's not what this deal was about.

    Will LiveJournal become TypePad or TypePad become LiveJournal?
    Nope. We have no plans of forceably merging the two sites and communities into one, either.... that just doesn't make sense.

    Will LiveJournal stay open source?
    The parts that are open source now will of course remain open source... And some new stuff that's infrastructure-related will probably also be released open source. We're all definitely pushing for it, and Six Apart "gets it" when it comes to open source. Of course there will be some closed parts... there are already some now. What I personally feel is important is making sure the infrastructure guts are available, so other people building new, creative websites will be able to focus on the fun stuff and not shelling out lots of money to commercial vendors for basic things like storage and load balancing.

    What happens to LiveJournal support and the volunteers?
    Volunteers can continue to help out on the site, and we'll continue our tradition of users helping users in open forums. The existing employee-only support categories (like payments) will remain employee-only and we might have to add more employees to abuse to help set standards for support, but the rest will be open. We understand that some percentage of the volunteers will be upset about this deal and quit volunteering, and that's regrettable, but we'll do our best to keep everybody happy.

    What everybody should understand is that LiveJournal was never a non-profit volunteer organization. Danga has always been a for-profit company and that's what volunteers contributed to. We just weren't aggressively for-profit trying to squeeze every last penny out of people. You'll have to make up your own minds about Six Apart and how they behave, but from what I've seen so far, they're very similar in behavior to Danga.

    So I read all this and don't get it --- what's changing?
    Really, not much.

    We help them, they help us.

    I need more info!
    Oh, it'll be flowing in for weeks. Ask away. We won't be able to read every comment, but we'll try.

    Update #1: I'm not going anywhere! I'm gonna work for Six Apart now (in San Fran), still doing LiveJournal stuff and infrastructure stuff.... I'll be their "Chief Architect". Likewise with the rest of the Danga stuff. If you think my baby (LiveJournal) will be destroyed, you better think again... I'm there to make sure they keep doing the right thing, but I'm already pretty sure that's all they will do.

    Update #2: Six Apart's announcements:
    http://www.sixapart.com/corner/archives/2005/01/current_mood_op.shtml
    http://www.sixapart.com/press/livejournal_acquisition_faq.shtml
    http://www.sixapart.com/press/weblogging_software_leader_six_apar.shtml


    Current Mood: excited
    Friday, December 31st, 2004
    2:11 pm
    [jproulx]
    State of the Goat 2005
    Another year is coming to a close, and it has been a good year for all of us here at LiveJournal. I hope 2005 will treat all of you just as well as 2004 treated us!

    2004 In Review
    2004 was a busy year for LiveJournal. Starting the year off, a few of us employees moved out to Oregon to come work in the LiveJournal office in Portland. Shortly thereafter our entire employee development team was located in the office. With a centralized design and development team we were able to make many improvements and tackle many projects.

    Some highlights for 2004 include:
    On top of all that, there's been a veritable slew of new features added to the site:
    Growth and Servers
    Last January we passed the milestone of the 2,000,000th account, now we host over 5,500,000 accounts. As you can imagine LiveJournal has grown up a lot this year! If this continues we can expect to see 7 or 8,000,000 accounts hosted by the time LiveJournal turns 6!

    Obviously this growth quickly brings to light any weak spot in our architecture, but we've been able to tackle traffic problems and roughly anticipate future growth. Starting off the year we converted most of our user clusters to Master-Master pairs, and later on we added a few new user clusters and another global master database server. Later on we started migrating users from MyISAM to InnoDB database tables, and we purchased a few pairs of 64 bit database servers to lighten the load.

    We had some vendor supply problems ordering 64 bit servers and the servers had some problems passing burn-in inspection, but now we have two pairs in production doing 65% of our database traffic without blinking an eye. All of the migration to 64 bit servers allows us to free up older hardware, making system administration easier.

    During the year we also bought a couple of storage servers that could hold 16 250GB disks each, giving us 8 terabytes of disk space. We started using that to host pictures and static files, and freed up our NetApp to host other things.

    For 2005 we're going to continue making optimizations and working towards high availability and reliability.

    ScrapBook
    Our major focus goal for 2004 (as evidenced by its many [info]news mentions!) was our new photo hosting service, which we've recently dubbed "ScrapBook". ScrapBook has matured quite a bit since our State of the Goat 2004, and has been made much more robust in the process. Because of ScrapBook development we can now offer Moblogging support, direct posting of galleries to LiveJournal accounts, copying of galleries and pictures between accounts, and many other features. We also wrote our own filesystem to store ScrapBook images on our storage servers, and now LiveJournal uses it to store all sorts of static files.

    Employees
    Last year we touched on employees who had recently joined the fold, but this year was a little more subdued. In January we hired [info]marksmith to come code in-house for random projects, and now he's a development powerhouse, blazing through tasks and to-do lists left and right. Our newest systems administrator Matthew ([info]mwilson) is kicking ass (that is, when he isn't damaging vital appendages!), and is providing welcome job relief for [info]lisa. [info]whitaker made it out for another short internship over the summer, but both he and [info]daveman692 left us to pursue their educations. They're working remotely for the time being, and they'll both be back next year. Last but not least we hired [info]bleything to help out our support and abuse department and to act as one of the liasons between our volunteers and office developers.

    Plans for 2005
    Looking ahead to the future, we plan to focus on a few key projects, while continuing to make improvements in all areas:
    • Opening up ScrapBook — we're going to continue developing features, but our immediate goals are to finish the necessary documentation and offer accounts the ability to upgrade disk space.
    • Journal usage statistics — our own web report statistics have become a lot easier to maintain, so we'll be investigating the best way to offer individual journal statistics.
    • Event Subscription Notifications — a much talked about project on LiveJournal, we now have better means to bring it to fruition.
    • Journal post categorization — we're in the planning stages of offering user-managed post categories, so that users can organize their journals better and readers can filter the content they want to see.
    • Improved taskflow and usability — we've made a lot of improvements in our usability design practices while developing ScrapBook that we'll be using on LiveJournal projects.
    Have a Happy New Year!
    Tuesday, November 30th, 2004
    2:58 pm
    [jproulx]
    November Status Post
    November is coming to a close, and stateside we're all stuffed to the brim with turkey and politics. Earlier in the month Brad and Lisa attended the LISA conference in Atlanta, so we gave our new systems administrator Matthew ([info]mwilson) a crash course in keeping the site running smooth. Matthew's worked with us before at Silicon Mechanics, helping us by building custom servers to order, so we were eager to welcome him to the team.

    November was a major bug fix month for developers. We prioritized bug fixes over new features, so [info]featureannounce has been pretty quiet. We're getting ready for some heavy holiday traffic, and we're preparing for loads of users uploading and sharing pictures.

    In hardware news we're testing out a pair of new Itaniums, which are more 64 bit servers from Intel. Our existing 64 bit servers are running well, and are handling most of the database traffic on the site. In addition to new servers we're continuing to rearrange users to optimize slow databases, and we're moving completely away from lower performance MyISAM tables to faster InnoDB tables. We also ordered and received a set of new Big IP load balancers, which are slowly being tested and put into production.

    FotoBilder development continued, and we renamed our photo hosting service to "ScrapBook" since "LiveJournal Photo Hosting Service" was a mouthful. We're a few days away from allowing people to buy more disk space (we still need a Terms of Service agreement and some more testing), and we're still planning and developing new features for ScrapBook.

    And finally, as the holidays roll around we're offering a bonus for items purchased in our Store: For every $50 spent on service items, like Paid Accounts or Extra Userpics, we'll send you a $15 coupon good for clothing purchases. The amount spent in the store is cumulative, so if you bought $20 one day and $30 the next, you'll still get a $15 coupon. If you've bought something in the past few days, don't worry -- the bonus deal is retroactive from November 26th (Past midnight on the 25th, 12:01AM GMT) and will extend to the end of December. All bonus coupons will be sent by e-mail, and will expire at midnight (GMT) of December 31st.

    Have a great December, and Happy Holidays!
    Monday, November 1st, 2004
    3:32 pm
    [bradfitz]
    GO VOTE! (today!)
    US FlagI feel bad kicking Jesse's October Status Post off the front page, but there's something more important that we had to mention....

    GO VOTE TOMORROW TODAY!

    Please.

    If you're an eligible voter in the United States, it's very important that you vote tomorrow today. The election in 2000 came down to a couple hundred votes, and this year's election is predicted to be even closer. Anybody who thinks that their vote doesn't make a difference should go read up on how close this election is. It's going to come down to handfuls of voters.

    It's said that young people don't vote, and that's really sad. Go grab some coffee, wait in line, SMS your friends, read a book, play Gameboy.... then vote. It'll take a couple minutes and you won't feel like a mere observer to our democratic process.

    Seriously, if you can vote tomorrow and you don't, I don't want to see any complaining on LiveJournal about this country over the next 4 years.... :-)
    Friday, October 29th, 2004
    5:19 pm
    [jproulx]
    October Status Post
    As October rolls to a close and you all prepare to go scare little children and eat pounds of candy, we'd like to present upon you the latest in LiveJournal news:

    October has been another quiet month for [info]featureannounce news. We've made a lot of improvements to the site's backend and we've added a bunch of hardware (detailed below), but we haven't made a lot of visible changes to the site. One thing we have changed is the fact that communities can now be renamed, using the Account Renaming Service. Another change is the fact that you can add comments to your user picture icons through the Edit User Pictures page, which will show up on your User Pictures page.

    Also, a new feature that went live last night is the "Quote" button on all "Post a Comment" pages. Simply highlight text you'd like to quote with your mouse (or other input device), press the "Quote" button on the comment page, and the text will appear in the comment text box with the proper HTML quotation tags. We're adding optional display support for our S2 styles to show your comment quotes in cool and interesting ways.

    In hardware news, we've setup and racked two out of four of our new 64 bit servers. We've run into a few production snags with MySQL, but we've been working with MySQL's support team to fix them and have made a lot of progress during the past week. In the meantime we're rearranging users between optimized clusters and switching from using MyISAM tables to InnoDB tables. Rearranging users is a slow process, but it's all we can do while we wait for the new servers to be put into production. We've also been working hard on our Perl load balancer, all of which is helping to speed up the site.

    During this past month we've been making preparations to stop using our content delivery network system (Akamai) and serve everything ourselves. This meant moving all phoneposts, user picture icons, and all sorts of static files onto our new storage servers using MogileFS. The same storage servers are being used to host FotoBilder pictures, and things have been running smoothly.

    Speaking of FotoBilder, November will be dedicated to bringing FotoBilder up to production quality and releasing our photo hosting service for paid users. This will include full technical support, the ability to purchase more space on our storage servers, and adding more web servers to speed everything up. We'd like to thank all the beta testers that have been helping us so far.

    We hope you all have a great November, and a Happy Halloween!
    Friday, October 1st, 2004
    3:31 pm
    [jproulx]
    September Status Post
    September has been bittersweet for LiveJournal. We've been working hard and making a lot of progress on various development projects, but some of our interns have gone back to college. Late last month [info]daveman692 left the office to go to college in New York, and our esteemed developer monkey [info]whitaker went back to Ohio for a few more semesters of school. Don't fret though — they're both still working for us in their spare time, and they'll both be back for internships at a later date.

    Since our last status post there have been two major feature updates that you might have already noticed. First, maintainers of communities are able to delete posts that are made in their communities and mark them as spam at the same time. This prepares a report for our abuse team and alerts us to possible misuse of our service.

    Second, and probably the most visible change: we've updated and streamlined the Update Journal and Edit Journal Entries pages to include a few new options and make it easier to use. Now when you use our web pages to update your journal, you'll be able to preview various parts of your entry as you write it, and also preview the entry as it would look in your journal. We've also added a few convenience links up at the top showing you the different ways available to update your journal. There's still a few quirks, but we're working to get rid of the leftover bugs.

    As always, keep an eye out for feature announcements in [info]featureannounce.

    In hardware news, as I mentioned in my last status post we ordered a new set of fast database servers, but since then we've run into various production snags and the delivery of the servers has been stalled. Because of the delays, we've ordered a bunch of new servers from various vendors, so we'll have a bunch of new machines in production soon. There have been a few posts in [info]lj_maintenance outlining the server problems: "Bad news, good news", "Server Update". Brad just gave me an update and it looks like two of the new databases will be installed tonight, two are showing up in the next couple days, and the final two are being built right now. The goal then is to move everybody off our old 32-bit databases to these six new 64-bit ones (we'll post a more technical summary in [info]lj_backend soon).

    Our photo hosting beta test is still running strong, and we've gotten a lot of great feedback from everyone involved (if you have a paid account and want to help out, please join [info]fotobilder_user). We've made a lot of progress on fixing bugs, writing documentation, cleaning up the interface, etc, and we're working on a couple of cool new features such as image sharing and style previews. We're also working on a new backend protocol for FotoBilder, which we hope will encourage developers to write new clients.

    Hope you all have a great October!
    Tuesday, August 31st, 2004
    5:47 pm
    [jproulx]
    August Status Post
    August has been pretty good for us, if a little quiet. Brad was on vacation in Germany for a few weeks, and we chugged along making tons of site enhancements and fixing bugs.

    In feature news we've added a new S2 style called "Variable Flow", which is available to all accounts. This style has been designed with customization in mind, according to its author [info]mart. Normal users can change just about anything in the customization wizard, such as page margins, fonts, colors, background images, etc. Paid accounts that write custom layers can change even more options, override certain strategic functions to add things like heading images, or even override the stylesheet completely making use of the fact that the markup is meaningful and styleable. It's a good style to choose if you want to get comfortable using S2. Feel free to check out [info]s2variableflow to learn more.

    For our paid accounts we've enhanced our "express lane", and today we can really see the results: page requests for paid users are loading a lot quicker, while non/free users are seeing a slight amount of lag (moreso with packet loss from Internap). Please note that we're continually optimizing the site because to us, even a slight lag is totally unacceptable.

    As for new hardware, we ordered a set of new database servers with 64 bit processors and a ton of RAM, which are still being assembled, configured, and tested. Once they're ready to be put in production we should see a lot of performance gains, but until then we're shifting resources around to help balance server load.

    Most important news of all, we've given all paid members beta testing access to our photo hosting site! There might be a little lag getting your account ready, but once you're set up you should be able to upload your pictures. We strongly encourage any paid member who is using our photo hosting service to join the [info]fotobilder_user community and give us feedback & suggestions.

    We're not completely launching the photo hosting service just yet because we're still in a major testing phase: we're still making improvements, still adding enhancements, and fixing all the bugs that pop up. There's a hard disk space limit of 50MB (you'll be able to upgrade to more space when it goes "live") and we're only running the FotoBilder code on two servers (storage servers are separate, so we won't run out of room), so we can't make any guarantee as to the quality of service you might receive. Please test at your own risk.

    Have a splendid September!
    Monday, August 2nd, 2004
    11:18 am
    [jproulx]
    July Status Post
    July's been pretty hectic for us; we had some server troubles early on in the month which we've taken care of, and most of us at the office have been working hard on FotoBilder and other projects.

    In new feature news, we've added a new page called Recent Comments which shows some of the latest comments you've posted and received on LiveJournal. Free users are limited to only 10 recent comments, but paid accounts can pull up to 50. The page is useful if you've not received your comment notification e-mails lately, but it's still a beta version so it may change at any time.

    In [info]paidmembers news we've added a new feature called the "Express Lane", which allows paid users' browser requests to "cut in line" of others. What this means is that when our web servers are loaded, paid accounts get pages served to them quicker than other accounts. There are more details in the paid members community.

    In picture hosting news we've widened our beta test to include permanent and paid early adopter accounts. Now we're getting a lot of great feedback which is helping us to polish FotoBilder and work out most of the bugs early on. We hope to have the service ready for all of our paid users before the end of August.

    This update is pretty scant, but we've actually been working a lot on on infrastructure and stability changes, which has taken priority over new features. Almost all of our current effort is being put into refining our photo hosting service, so we'll have a better post (more information) for next month.

    Have a fantastic August!
    Tuesday, June 29th, 2004
    4:25 pm
    [jproulx]
    June Status Post
    We'd like to welcome [info]brett, our new sysadmin, to the LiveJournal team. Our dynamic duo of Lisa and Brett should be able to handle anything we throw their way.

    We spent a lot of time in June taking care of various issues; fixing bugs, getting FotoBilder ready for launch, fine-tuning our new load balancer, developing more site monitoring tools, etc etc. There aren't too many new features we can announce just yet, but we did add something cool:

    There's a new feature on the comment pages (for those of you using S1, or S2 with old style comments) called Quick Reply, which is a reply box that instantly appears underneath a comment you want to respond to. We're working on porting this feature over to S2, so that everyone can benefit from it.

    More new features & bug fix announcements can be found at [info]featureannounce.

    During the past few weeks we outgrew our network topology. This caused brief periods of downtime and long periods of slowness, at least until we were able to reconfigure our network and increase server interconnection speeds. We'd like to apologize for those hiccups, and we'll be offering some reimbursements for paid users affected by that slowness. We'll have more details posted in [info]paidmembers either today or tomorrow.

    We've started a beta test for our photo hosting service, and we've gotten some great feedback so far. We're still working on various bugs and interface design, but development has come along very swiftly. We'd like to thank all of those involved with the beta test.

    We're aiming to launch pics.livejournal.com publically in the next couple of months, hopefully before the end of summer.

    Have an awesome July!
    Thursday, June 3rd, 2004
    11:34 am
    [bradfitz]
    AOL not accepting LiveJournal mail
    So I'm told that AOL is rejecting all LiveJournal mail. I guess we send out so much mail (comment replies and such) that we look like spammers.

    There are some hoops we need to jump through to get "white-listed" so this doesn't happen again, and we're starting down that road, but in the meantime be aware that AOLers won't be getting mail from us.

    Update: I guess the problem isn't how much mail we send, but how often AOL users click "Report as spam" instead of "Delete" in their mail clients. So if you'd like to help prevent this from happening in the future, please don't report comment replies as spam. Thanks! :-)

    Update #2: AOL has noticed this news posting and removed us from their blacklist, onto their whitelist. (effective tomorrow evening by 7pm EDT/EST) Thanks, AOL! Notice to AOL users: your normal spam filters may or may not still mark LJ messages as spam (depends on your settings), but at least now you have the possibility of receiving our mail at all.
    Friday, May 28th, 2004
    8:30 pm
    [jproulx]
    May Status Post
    We won the People's Voice Webby Awards! We're still pretty excited about that, and we're grateful for all of the congratulations we received.

    In staff news, we recently hired [info]bleything to help take on some of the technical support and customer service duties. Go team!

    This past month we made a bunch of changes to how communities are maintained. There's a new page for creating communities that makes the whole process a bit simpler, and community maintainers can now use the "Transfer Community" page to transfer communities. We've also brought back the community invite feature, but we've changed it so that people are no longer e-mailed invite notifications. You can see if you have any pending invites on the Manage Community Invitations page.

    We've also been working on a new S2 style during the past two weeks called "Unearthed", available for all users. It's brand new, so we're still working out all of the kinks. We figured we'd let everyone try it out while we're working on it, so you can go to the "Customize Journal" page and choose the new style. If you have comments, questions, or bug reports for the style, please join the [info]s2unearthed community and post there.

    In [info]paidmembers news, we've added a few new phone numbers for our Post by Phone service, and The Text Messaging Team added a bunch of new options to our supported providers list. We also wrote a new mood theme editor, which should help make mood themes easy to create and maintain.

    There's a new comment management option when you delete a comment: you can choose to delete all of the comments that were in that "thread" (all of the reply comments). You can also "freeze" comment threads by clicking the ice cube button next to the comment, which will disable replies to the thread but keep the existing comments visible to the public.

    For a summary of all new features, be sure to check out the communities [info]featureannounce and [info]lj_nifty.

    In FotoBilder news, we had to make a bunch of optimizations in our file management and quota integration tools, and we ran into a few unexpected hardware problems, but we're almost ready to start beta-testing the new photo hosting service. Once we work out any bugs our beta-testers encounter, we'll start allowing people to upload their pictures and purchase more disk space.

    Have a great June!
    Wednesday, May 12th, 2004
    12:58 pm
    [jproulx]
    We won!
    2004 People's Voice Winner We are proud to announce that LiveJournal won the People's Voice Webby Award for the "community" category!

    We'd like to thank everyone who voted for the awards, and we'd like to thank all of our users, because we wouldn't have gotten anywhere without you!
    Wednesday, May 5th, 2004
    12:33 pm
    [bradfitz]
    Whoa -- teen pregnancy stuff
    In regards to our previous post about the "The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy":

    We didn't mean to piss anybody off. We're not dissing teen parents or products of teen parents.

    We didn't know the site/campaign was so slanted, and we definitely didn't know some of their ads were so tasteless.

    We weren't trying to push a political agenda. We're definitely not hard-core conservatives around here. (quite the opposite, generally)

    What we wanted to say was: If you're a teen and don't want to get pregnant, there are ways to not get pregnant. That's all.

    We'll try and do a better job at either not being "oppresively political", or reviewing what we do support to make sure the campaign accurately reflects our beliefs.

    That said, HAPPY CINCO DE MAYO!!!!!
    10:43 am
    [jproulx]
    National Day to Prevent Teen Pregnancy
    We were approached by The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy to help them spread the word about teen pregnancy and its effect on society. The third annual "National Day to Prevent Teen Pregnancy" takes place today, and they're asking that teenagers nationwide take a short, online quiz to reflect on the best course of action in a number of tough sexual situations. We don't usually post things like this, but considering the average age of our userbase, we feel that this is a worthy cause. If you have a few minutes to spare, and you're between the ages of 13-19, please consider taking the quiz.
    Sunday, May 2nd, 2004
    8:32 am
    [jproulx]
    Password Scam
    We've received reports of yet another password scheme making the rounds. This one looks like an e-mail from LiveJournal, telling you that your password has been changed and offering you a link to log on. However, the link leads to a site that's trying to spoof LiveJournal with a similar-looking domain name.

    We do not change users' passwords for them, nor do we ever ask for your password through e-mail. If you receive this e-mail, do not follow the link.

    Please always double-check the link in the address bar of your browser before logging into LiveJournal and make sure that you are visiting livejournal.com.
    Tuesday, April 27th, 2004
    3:09 pm
    [jproulx]
    April Status Report
    [info]whitaker arrived in town at the end of March, and he's been working like a mad-monkey ever since. Occasionally I'll look up from my desk and I'll see him dancing an interpretive dance of gangstas and monkeys. He's very…odd.

    Brad flew out to Orlando for a MySQL conference a few weeks ago and gave a presentation on LiveJournal and Memcached. LiveJournal was a runner-up for the MySQL Application of the Year award, and we were presented with a cool dolphin statue.

    New Features
    This month we added a bunch of new features, thanks to the efforts of our employee & volunteer developers.

    We've added a "preview" mode to the Update Journal and Edit Journal pages, which lets you preview your entry before you post or make changes to it.

    We've completely removed syndication points from the site, so now you can add as many syndicated feeds as you'd like. The only difference now is that only paid and permanent accounts can create new syndicated accounts.

    There are a few changes on your User Information pages that you may have noticed. We've split up all of the accounts in your friends lists into three different categories: personal, community, and syndicated accounts. There's also a new option on the Edit Information Page called "Display mutual friends on profile page" which lists users who you list as friends and who list you as a friend back on your User Information page.

    For a summary of all new features, be sure to check out the communities [info]featureannounce and [info]lj_nifty.

    The Webby Awards
    As [info]lisa announced earlier, we've been nominated for a Webby award for the Community category. We're honored that we got the nomination, and we encourage you to vote for your favorite websites.

    FotoBilder
    We've made a lot of progress with our photo hosting service - [info]whitaker modified our payment system to allow people to buy blocks of disk-space (details to be announced later), and I've been working on cleaning up FotoBilder's account management pages so that it's easy and natural to use. We've even bought a new set of servers that will reliably host up to 8 terabytes of files, spread out and replicated over many 250GB disks on different hosts so that data is never lost.

    There's a few more things we need to do before FotoBilder is ready, but we hope to release http://pics.livejournal.com/ for public beta testing in the next few weeks.

    Hope you all have a great May!
    Thursday, April 22nd, 2004
    10:52 am
    [lisa]
    2004 Webby Awards
    We're delighted and honored that Livejournal.com has been nominated for a Webby. Voting is going on right now, so when you have a moment hop over and place your vote for your favorite community site!
    Thursday, April 1st, 2004
    9:45 am
    [bradfitz]
    April Fools
    Heh... Keep in mind everybody that it's April Fools today. (For international readers: Apr. 1 is our "joke/prank day")

    This flood of lawsuit threats and hate mail seems to be slightly above average... I can't decide if it's legit, or it's just your April Fools jokes back at us. Surely a few of you have a sense of humor. :-) I have to assume the people not mailing us are the amused ones.

    lj_serialadder is a fake account. It's a joke targetting all the hubbub in lj_biz lately about serial adders.

    Nobody hacked your journal and added "Stalking" and "Stalked by" instead of "Friends" and "Friend of". It's a joke emphasizing people's concerns about how the "Friend of" label is bad, and they want a difference between friends/reading/trust/know-in-real-life/etc.

    LJ didn't buy DeadJournal. (that's their prank)

    Also didn't buy ljdrama.org. Their prank again.

    etc, etc.
    Wednesday, March 24th, 2004
    5:12 pm
    [jproulx]
    March Status Report
    LiveJournal turned 5 this year! Five years ago on March 18th [info]bradfitz wrote the first post that started it all. Now we’re hosting over two and a half million accounts, half of which are actively being used in some way - that’s a lot of accounts. Thanks everyone for all of your support!

    Brad’s flying out Friday to keep Super Monkey (aka [info]whitaker) awake on the road as he drives to Portland from Ohio. Whitaker really is a super monkey, he’s gonna dance around for us and bust out some mad code.

    Since our status post from last month we’ve worked quite a bit on profiling our codebase, and we started putting together a regression test suite to help us review development changes as we make them. As for new hardware, we’ve recently installed 4 new web servers, and we have another set of database servers that we’re getting ready to put live.

    Another thing we’ve worked on throughout March was how we handle spam comments some of you receive in your journals. We’ve written a new spam report tool for us that works when you check the “Mark this comment as spam” box while deleting a single comment. The comment is deleted as normal but logged separately, which helps us to identify and eliminate spam trends and repeat spam offenders. Also, anonymous people who make more than a few comments during a brief amount of time are required to prove that they’re human by completing a captcha. [info]bradfitz recently summarized the spam issues on LiveJournal in the community [info]lj_biz.

    On the topic of spam, just today we’ve started using the real-time black lists (SBL & XBL) published from Spamhaus.org to filter spam on our mail servers. Most of the time legitimate email will not be blocked by these lists, but in the unlikely event you are having problems receiving mail at your @livejournal.com address, you may want to have the sender’s internet service provider check the SBL & XBL to determine if they are listed. Our point is not to block any legitimate e-mail but rather to prevent abusers from flooding our servers and causing mail delays for you.

    We’ve been working a lot on splitting up friends lists between people you trust and journals you read, and with our new Goatvote system it’s a lot easier to field public opinion and shape our policies appropriately. Recently we made a decision to allow you to ban accounts so they won’t show up on the “friends of” list on your user information page.

    In [info]paidmembers news, we recently rewrote and brought back the “Popular Users Amongst Your Friends” tool. This month we’ll be working on bringing back other features we’ve disabled in the past, as well as working with our VoIP service providers to provide Post by Phone Access Numbers in west coast & midwest states.

    The big goal for April is continuing work on our photo hosting service. You can take a peek at the new site by going to http://pics.livejournal.com/. Note: this is running on Brad’s personal server, so be aware that this news post will probably flood it with traffic. When we make the service public it’ll be running on tons of machines.

    Have a good month folks!
    Friday, March 5th, 2004
    4:22 pm
    [bradfitz]
    goatvote results: friend-of hiding
    The conclusions from the recent Goatvote argument solicitation regarding hiding friend-ofs and "serial adders" are now available here:

    http://www.livejournal.com/community/lj_biz/218340.html

    Thanks for everybody's great input!
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