With nominations for the LJ advisory board open, I would like to suggest that this group choose a member to put forth. That way the desires of this community will have someone actively promoting them in a place where they might be more openly heard, and there would also be the support of the community to get that suggested individual closer to the 100 motions of support that will be needed.

What do you folks think? Would someone here be willing to do that, and would you folks be willing to support someone from this community? I think most of us here care enough about LJ that we would be appropriate for the role.

It's our usual policy to try to not post Yet Another Inappropriate Ad posts, as previous discussion indicated them to be not very informative. However, the recent ad campaign by Scientology has generated a decent amount of flare up unusual to most ads considered objectionable; we have spotted support requests, been notified by multiple members through post attempts and backchannel means, and been shown complaints "in the wild", as it were. Full report is under the cut for those who wish to view it and hidden from those who would prefer not to.

Notable reminders relevent to inappropriate ads:

* LJ does not screen all ads. The ad networks they run for "remnant" spaces can show ads that might be inappropriate and have to manually be screened.
* LJ used to have feedback links around all ad spaces that could be used to conveniently report inappropriate ads, but these were removed.
* To my best knowledge, feedback is the officially sanctioned way of reporting ads you feel are inappropriate.
* There is no way to customize the categories in ad settings to avoid certain ads. The categories are only suggestions to help target, not instructions on what to show.

( Ad report )

Update: marta has reported the Scientology ad has been pulled due to reports and confirms that Feedback is indeed the official way to report ads you feel are inappropriate. It is good to include the describe the size, color, text, URL of the ad as well as link to any screenshot you have taken. This helps identify the ad to be removed.

I'm a permanent user, and though my homepage is set to my userinfo, occasionally I'll be directed to the main page when I'm logged out for one reason or another, and I see ads. For more on why this is messed up, see "permanent user."

I recently downloaded adblock plus for this specific reason, and I used it today to filter LJ ads when I was redirected to the main page. This is what I saw:

( advertisement )

When I went into ABP to make a new filter, I found the URL of the image, which started with this:

http://ads.sixapart.com/show?gender=F&age=19

First of all, I'm offended that I was targeted for this ad because I'm a young female. The assumption is that we're all easy prey for weight loss hoaxes because we hate our bodies. But that's not the main reason I'm posting.

My question is, if LiveJournal is giving me this ad because it has cookies that say I'm 19 and female, information gained from when I set up my journal, then it obviously knows I'm a user, and a permanent one at that. How can they justify taking information from my profile to target me with certain ads, and at the same time say, "Well, you're not logged in, so for all we know you're a non-user"?

A lot of suggestions have just been posted and several of them deal with ads, basic accounts, sponsored accounts, etc. and/or account levels in general, the basic idea being how LJ can continue generating revenue and keep their users/keep their users happy.

In other words suggestions is waiting for your 2 cents. :)

ETA: foxfirefey kindly provided links!

Basic accounts suggestion
About new Sponsored accounts
Basic accounts and Paid users
Basic accounts
Keeping basic ad-free accounts, without losing much ad revenue
Refunds
Possible Feature for Permanent Account Holders?

Hello all,

I was wondering if someone could answer this question I have. How much does it cost to run Livejournal -- or rather, why does it seem more costly to run than Blogspot? 

I've been looking at some of the past entries and the community's memories, but I don't see anything closely related. I know that there are some people here who work or have worked with Livejournal before, so I was hoping that they can answer my question. And I am genuinely curious -- I'm not being snarky or snide or anything.

Blogspot does not utilize advertising, but it is probably the most widely used blogging platform around. While there are plenty of Blogspot sites that splatter their blog with ads, the profits of those ads do not go to Blogspot (to my understanding), they go to the owner of the blog. From a purely layman's perspective, it makes little sense why Blogspot, which has more 'freeloaders' on it, be able to function without reliance on ads, and other blogging / networking sites like Multiply and recently, Livejournal, do. 

In the case of Livejournal, most of the  material posted on it are text-based, there is some allocation for graphics, so in general a single user can't really take up that much server space. Many users pay for their accounts -- presumably, the amount that they pay covers up the cost of those who use it for free. A lot of Livejournal runs on volunteer energy. Blogspot accounts tend to be quite graphic heavy and is fully supported by a salaried staff. 

(From an avaricious user's perspective: if it comes to a point when all Basic Accounts will be splattered with ads, I would consider it a rip off; there is no reason why I ought to be forced to look at ads when the money doesn't end up with me, when I can put ads easily on another service and have money come back to me)

So -- and I am genuinely curious -- as to why people at the higher ups believe that Livejournal need to function on advertising in order to be profitable, or even necessary for its survival. Does the Livejournal code itself take up a lot of server space? I know that Insanejournal has problems with coding recently that caused the server to break down. Does Blogspot / Blogger have some additional form of revenue coming in from its partnership with Google?

If there is anyone who can give me an answer for this, I'd really appreciate it. Thanks.

I just changed my journal's theme and saw this for the first time, and it really pissed me off. When paid users go to edit their journal's themes, there they are, right on the very first page, sponsored themes, AKA ADS. I know someone already posted about this here, but I come bearing screen caps, which I've posted behind the cut:
( Read more... )

Is there something we can do about this? I know when they came out with sponsored v-gifts there was an uproar until they let paid users opt out of them but that was under 6-Apart. (that sponsored contend should, from the beginning, be DEFAULT OPT OUT for paid users is a rant for another post) Will SUP honor giving paid users opt outs if we remind them we should have it?

What happened to you pay, you see no ads? This really disgusts me.

Alright alright, let's cut this down to remove the inflammatory stuff. Edited at 3am Mar 23.

Postmortem on the strike: The following numbers come from the archive of stats.bml hosted on noljads.com. Note that the page for a specific date is actually that for the date before, since the snapshot is taken at 00:00 the night of. The "Updating in past 24 hours" number after the 21st was 167858. It was 190573 the previous day. So, okay, that's a 12% day-to-day drop. Historical data shows that this magnitude of a day-to-day drop occurs, well, every single Friday. So if that's the only measure of the success of the strike, the strike wasn't a success at all. There are external effects that are difficult to quantify. foxfirefey says that this community gained about 100 watchers, so that's at least something.

However, i am extremely doubtful that the net benefit of this strike, and other actions that LJ users have taken in the past, is anything better than neutral. I'm worried that when things like this happen, actions that fail to reach escape velocity, it becomes just another reason for people to say "lol, everyone on LJ who cares about this stuff are just a bunch of drama queens." I know that's not true, but is that the impression people are getting?

You would be interested in this http://community.livejournal.com/sup_ru/374846.html

Soon SUP will start testing a new type of account called "Sponsored account". The user who selects such an account type will have all the functionality of a paid account without paying (it will be paid by the advertiser). In return the user's profile will feature the advertiser's banner, and the journal will feature the advertiser's style. If an advertiser has a sponsored community, the user will be automatically added to it. The user can choose the advertiser and the advertiser's style that s/he likes.

Testing period starts within a month. People will be able to leave comments and suggestions. Then the offer will be made available to all Russian users, and later after appropriate agreements are signed abroad, the functionality will be available to all users.

--
in comments, there are clarifications that the Paid users will not see the advertisers' banners on Sponsored accounts, but will see the advertisers' styles. ?style=mine however will still override the advertisers' styles.

Edit: there are a couple of other interesting comments now. In particular, when you select a sponsor there will be a period of time during which you can decide whether you like the sponsor or not. Afterwards, you will not be able to switch account type or choose another sponsor for 3 months. Another tidbit is that sponsors will be able to refuse to sponsor you (if for instance you comment negatively about them).

I would like to bring up the idea of forking the Livejournal codebase. This means more than just taking the code and starting another site. It means an entirely new development project that may result in a completley different kind of codebase in a few years of evolution.

I have started a community, forklivejournal with the aim of discussing this.

I would like to state, for the record, that I have never touched a piece of Perl my entire life. I don't view my creation of the community as an act proclaiming myself the "leader" of some glorious revolution. I just want to get the ball rolling, and provide the nexus space to achieve that. I will be more than happy to delegate modship to those more worthy of it.

I am not however, ignorant of the basic ideas of Computer Science. I /can/ code, just not in Perl. I have a smattering of knowledge of other languages, and I know C++. I've been picking up PHP over the past month.

I do have some input I'd like to make however:

• This project should begin with an exhaustive historical audit of Livejournal's code, not only as it stands now but as it used to stand since the very first post was made.


• This audit should produce comprehensive documentation about the development of Livejournal and how it behaves, making development of the Livejournal codebase easier for newcomers.


• Only after the aduit is completed should we attempt a launch of a production website.


• "Prototyping" should be opened up to other languages, so that any programmer that wishes to contribute to the project can contribute. When brad chose to use Perl, he cut off many users with bright ideas from helping in Livejournal's development, pre-2001.


• Critical parts of the code should not be kept in Perl. They should be taken to a lower level language such as C++

I'm not surprised that this escaped notice, between Basic Accounts, censored interests, and contemptuous Russians, but sponsored styles are back.

There are three new featured themes, by "HP.com/gwen", which you can access directly here. Each contains some kind of embedded web bug in the header that links through doubleclick.net to some page on HP.com about Gwen Stefani.

Not sure is that interview was already translated (http://www.izbrannoe.info/30184.html -- original interview in Russian).

A CAVE WILL BE PROVIDED TO ALL WILLING

( Read more... )

Uh, greetings. I'm Cody, and I'm new here. My opposition to LJ Plus accounts isn't so much with having to see ads on the 'user interface' pages on LJ (I can deal with that if it's absolutely necessary), as much as it is having them plastered on my own content with no control over which ads show up. Suffice it to say, it's really frustrating when you're trying to make some big point against something and the supposedly 'context-sensitive' ads are all for the very thing you were denouncing...

Anyway...

This was already suggested in this post in ljspeaks, and I have no idea how much of an impact it would actually make, but Im surprised it hasn't been mentioned here.

What if we could find a way of convincing people who have a Plus account created before 12 March to switch their journals back to Basic?

I'm not sure how much of an impact this would make (how many Plus accounts are there, anyway?), but it would have a twofold effect:
1. Basic users, and non-LJ members, stumbling across their journals would not see the ads, thus serving as a monetary protest to LJ.
2. This could potentially skew the statistics in favor of Basic, showing LJ that hey, maybe there is a demand for basic accounts after all.

Any thoughts? Is this just a hairbrained cloud-cuckoo-land idea, or is there actually some substance to it?

Edited to add: Just added this to the queue for ljspeaks as well.

LJ Population Stats, Round 2. Go here.

tl;dr: It looks like the activity rate is stabilizing from its decline over the past three years, but it's really too early to be sure.

Hello

I see all those new comms showing up about 'trading accounts'. And I wonder, why not just use pre-existing ones that already have a few members rather than trying to get another one off the ground?

I'd suggest recycled_lj, which is for all kinds of accounts, not just basic ones.
It's not my community but I have used it before and like it.

Just a thought.

As expected, communities are popping up specifically for trading basic accounts. I created one called basic_accounts.

t_eyla has created one as well called basic_journals (see below), so please spread the word about both.

Since I have quite a few myself, I'll be giving one away (no trade necessary) monthly. I have not worked out all the details of that yet (it's finals week!) so if anyone has any ideas, let me know =)

I don't see the two communities (and the others that will inevitably come later) as competing, since the ultimate point is to avoid ads at all costs.