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Welcome to LiveJournal news. If you crave more frequent and detailed news, check out the following journals:

[info]newsInfrequent, basic, overall news. (this page) RSS Feed
[info]lj_maintenanceServer status and planned downtime announcements. RSS Feed
[info]lj_devLiveJournal technical development & planning. RSS Feed
[info]changelogEvery little change, as it happens. RSS Feed
[info]lj_testThe testing community, for testing the above changes. RSS Feed
[info]featureannounceA weekly digest of changelog events and new features. RSS Feed
[info]lj_bizLiveJournal business-related community. RSS Feed

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Mid-March news

Wednesday, Mar 15th, 2006 -- 11:44 am

ljkrissy		 As many of you are relaxing on your Spring Break, the LJ team has been hard at work to bring you good news for the springtime!

More Userpics for Paid Accounts
The good news for paid accounts is that we're doubling your userpics to 30! If 30 is still not enough, paid account holders can purchase the userpic add-on to increase their limit to 100.

We're also excited to announce the Loyalty Userpics program for paid account holders. For every three months that you have a paid account, we will award you one bonus userpic. The bonus userpics will continue to add up for as long as you have paid time, but if your paid account expires, your limit will fall back to the free level. Whenever you renew your paid account, your bonus userpics will be restored.

To reward you for the paid account time you've had in the past, we are going to increase your limits retroactively.  If you want to earn your retroactive Loyalty Userpics, make sure you are a current paid account member or that you renew your paid account within the next 30 days (our retroactive offer expires at midnight GMT on April 14, 2006).  Permanent account holders will always have the maximum amount of Loyalty Userpics possible, which as of today is 32 (bringing their total to 132), and will accrue Loyalty Userpics at the same rate going forward. Please see the FAQ for additional details. It might take a little while for your retroactive userpics to kick in, but you should see them shortly.

If you want to earn Loyalty Userpics, sign up for a paid account and have your credit card billed automatically with automatic payments, or get a paid account with manual payments.  Check out your new userpic limit now!


New Virtual Gifts
Here at LiveJournal, we'll be celebrating Fitzpatrick's Day on March 17th in honor of our own Fitzpatricks [info]bradfitz and [info]ryanfitz (it's [info]jtrevino's birthday too!)  Wish your friends a happy St. (Fitz)Patrick's Day with our Good Luck Clover virtual gift. You can also send a clover to wish someone luck with a test, a game, a competition, or anything important in their lives.

Send your friends a Bubbly Brew when they've had a hard day, or when the weather heats up and your friend needs a tall, cool one. Next time you have to miss a party, you can tell your friends "drink one for me!"


Fixes and Features
On Friday night our operations team accomplished a major database hardware upgrade with less than 10 minutes downtime to our users (under our 20 minute prediction). We expect this upgrade will greatly reduce the number of database errors you may have been getting and early numbers indicate that wait times for all users are almost half what they were prior to the upgrade.  Keep an eye on [info]lj_maintenance for updates on server work, including our soon to be announced memories fix.

We just added a feature that lets you play a voice post recording directly from your journal or friends page, rather than having to download the file and launch a separate player.  (Voice posting is a paid account feature.)  You can also preview our new rich text editor by clicking on rich text link from the Update Journal page. 

There's a lot going on and we want to keep you all involved, so keep an eye on [info]lj_biz, [info]lj_design, [info]lj_spotlight and [info]news for all the latest.

Last but not least, long-time volunteer [info]burr86 is joining us as a development intern to coordinate and maintain our bug and issue database.  Welcome to the team, Abe!

Corniest Feature EVAR

Friday, Feb 10th, 2006 -- 2:53 pm

ljkrissy		 Valentine's Day is coming up and we were trying to think of the quickest, corniest feature we could whip up that would be fun. Brad and one of the founders of Hot Or Not were talking a few months ago about their Virtual Flowers feature and Brad asked if we could borrow it... So we did.

Starting today you can go to the Gift Shop to purchase virtual gifts to be delivered to the user info page of anyone with a LiveJournal account. You can choose a gift of one red rose, one yellow rose, a dozen red roses, balloons, or a box of chocolates, and you can send a personalized note with each one so you can show off your own haiku skills. Each virtual gift will display on the recipient's profile page for two weeks before wilting away.

As a bonus, anytime you receive 10 or more virtual gifts within a two week period, we'll credit you two months paid time to your account as our present to you. This bonus offer will run at least through the end of this month.

We're launching virtual gifts for Valentine's Day but we're planning on keeping the feature available all the time. You can send virtual gifts for any occasion from birthdays to anniversaries, or for no occasion at all.

Watch the [info]news to hear about more features the engineers have been working on, including a much improved rich text editor, draft support, and a cool feature we've nicknamed "userpic factory." Stay tuned for more details!

February News

Thursday, Feb 2nd, 2006 -- 3:50 pm

ljkrissy		 Punxsutawney Phil says there will be six more weeks of winter, so don't pack away your warm LJ hoodie just yet!

Frank the Comic
Thanks to the genius of [info]ryanestrada, our faithful mascot Frank is now the star of his own comic strip. Visit [info]frankthecomic to read the first three installments of the ballad of Frank, which answers the question: "How can a goat use a computer?" Ryan will release a new comic about once a week. Be sure to join the community to get access to special treats like userpics and desktop images.

Site Security
The engineering, ops, support and abuse teams have been hard at work making sure that LiveJournal is secure. We've always made security-related changes as they've become necessary, and we will continue to do so. The following is a brief recap of the vulnerabilites we faced recently as well as the fixes that were committed.

The technical details are complex (read the details in [info]lj_dev), but this specific vulnerability was the result of the way Mozilla/Firefox browsers handled certain behaviors possible in a user's journal style. All browsers have vulnerabilities, just like all big services like LJ have occasional bugs; many of us use Firefox and we all use LJ and we will continue to do so. We have handled this security situation by aggressively working to fix the vulnerability, supporting users with responses from our Support team, updating our users without disclosing sensitive technical details before the fix was complete, and following up with ongoing support and more communication.

For those of you who had a negative experience over the past week or so, we are truly sorry. We hate to see any one of you have a bad time on LJ. We worked with users to resecure and clean up a couple hundred accounts. Our fixes resulted in some bugs and general performance issues that certainly affected many more of you, and we regret any inconvenience it caused. We really appreciate everyone being patient and supportive during this time.

To help you better protect your account, we've created a page where you can view every login to your account to make sure no one but yourself is accessing it. In keeping with LiveJournal's open philosophy, we're asking for the community's help to find and report any undiscovered security issues. If this interests you and you'd like to participate, check out [info]lj_dev for ongoing details.

New LJ Design Community
Our design team has created a community where LiveJournal team members can discuss design questions, issues, and new ideas for LiveJournal with the LJ community. Visit [info]lj_design to meet the team and share your feedback.

Valentine's Day is right around the corner. Head to [info]21406 to confess your secret LJ crush, and stay tuned to [info]news for our upcoming Valentine's Day plans!

Changes to User Subdomains

Thursday, Jan 19th, 2006 -- 2:47 am

ljkrissy		 Starting tonight, you can now reach your journal and community at a new, shorter user subdomain. No action is needed on your part.

All journals will now be located at http://username.livejournal.com.
All communities will now be located at http://community.livejournal.com/username.

We realize this is a big change, and that many of you will have questions. Here are some answers to questions you may have:
  • Why is LiveJournal making this change now?
    • Recent changes to a popular browser have enabled malicious users to potentially gain control of your account. As soon as we heard about it, we began implementing changes to protect your account, and this is one of the last steps of the required changes. The rest will be happening in the next few days. We'll post to our development journal with more in-depth details about these changes.

  • Will my links and bookmarks still work?
    • Yes, all of your links and bookmarks will continue to work. You will not need to go back and change them. They will simply redirect to the new URL. However, if you do change your links and bookmarks, it could save you a fraction of a second (avoiding the redirect).

  • What if my username starts or ends with a dash or underscore? ("__username")
    • If your username begins or ends with a dash or underscore, your journal will be located at http://users.livejournal.com/__username or your community will be located at http://community.livejournal.com/__username. You will not have to change your username, but if you'd like to change it we will offer you one rename (per username beginning or ending with a dash or underscore) for free. If you'd like to take advantage of this offer, go to the Rename page while logged into that account.

  • Weren't user subdomains previously a paid account feature?
    • Yes, but now we've opened this feature to everyone. To offset this change to the paid account benefits, we are going to raise the voice post limit to 20 per month, up from just 15. Paid account holders should also note that we recently increased the maximum number of custom S2 styles you can create from 10 to 50, and the maximum number of custom layers you can create increased from 50 to 150.

  • What do I need to do about this change?
    • You don't need to do anything. All URLs will automatically redirect, and the only change you will notice is the address that shows in your browser window.

  • Why is this change good for me?
    • This change makes your account and the entire site more secure. Also, this should also secure your accounts from unknown browser vulnerabilities in the future, so consider this both a reactionary and a pre-emptive measure that will continue to pay off over time. Plus, it's shorter! You can now share a simplified journal address with your friends and family.

Thanks for your understanding about this important change, and have fun with your new, shorter URLs!
Tuesday, Jan 17th, 2006 -- 2:03 pm

ljkrissy		 We've been busy getting the new year started off right, and we already have some progress to share with you. Check out some recent additions and changes to the site:

Nudge
Did you get nudged this weekend? Last week we launched the new nudge feature, which enables you to tell an LJ friend that you miss them and want them to update their journal. We've been nudging our friends and have had a great time seeing them get inspired to update!

To nudge a friend, visit their user info page and click the nudge icon. You can select who you'd like us to send a short message to, and we'll also show you a list of friends along with how recently they've posted. You can't nudge someone who has posted in the past 7 days and you can only nudge mutual friends; read the FAQ for more details. Go send some nudges!

Improved Site Search
A few weeks ago we asked some of our volunteers to tag the entire site, including management pages and FAQs (not including journals or communities). They have since added close to three thousand tags! You can't see these tags, but they will help with site searches. So say you are looking for voice post numbers, you can now simply type "voice post" into the search box at the top of each page on LJ. We do plan to make navigation better overall, but this is a nice intermediate step if you know what you're looking for, but not where to find it.

Comments & Interests
Now you can view recent comments made to your journal or communities you maintain by clicking on the comments link underneath the Journal heading in the nav bar. Also check out the new popular interest tag cloud to find other users who share your interests!

Feed Icon Change
You may have noticed that we changed the icon for syndicated feeds. It used to look like this Old Syndicated Feed Icon but it now looks like this New Syndicated Feed Icon.

We'd like to remind you that you can add website feeds to your friends page. Just find a feed that you're interested in and follow the link at the top of the page to add it. Free accounts can add any feed that has been created already -- visit the list of popular feeds for some ideas of what to add. Paid accounts can add new syndicated feeds by using the form at the end of the page. You can also visit [info]syn_promo where users post announcements of feeds they create and watch.

Password changes
As we mentioned a few weeks ago, we have updated our password requirement policies. We understand some of you may not feel your account needs this level of protection, but an overwhelming number of you had passwords that were extremely easy for automated programs to guess. While we protect individual accounts against a brute force attack, many scripts instead try the same common password on thousands of accounts until they find one that it works on. This leaves your account vulnerable to someone altering your user info, spamming communities, or posting graphic objectionable content under your username. A password cracker could also publicize your, and your friends', private and friends-only entries for the world to see. We understand that changing your password is inconvenient, but we hope you understand our reasons for keeping our security requirements high. If you are encountering problems changing your password, please feel free to contact Support to request assistance.

Translation updates
Did you know that LiveJournal supports 32 different languages? You can set your language when choosing your browse options.

Translations on LiveJournal are coordinated and completed by volunteers around the world. Special thanks to our Russian, German, and Finnish teams who are the most consistent in keeping their translations current. We are always in need of new volunteers, so if you're interested in helping out, check out all the teams. If you have any questions, ask them in [info]lj_translate.

Go Team Leaky Canoe!
Last but not least, the LiveJournal Schools Directory volunteers were proud to announce we officially hit the 100,000 approved schools mark at 8:47p PST on Jan 14, 2006. Way to go everyone!

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