more notifications problems at LJ?

[charmian]

http://news.livejournal.com/135669.html?thread=94245621#t94245621

Currently there's a notifications problem at LJ, which apparently has something to do with a third party [EDIT: possibly Spamhaus]. People are getting fairly upset about it in the comments of the news post (well, also because of the banner color scheme).

Also, LJ is currently blacklisted with Spamhaus.

http://news.livejournal.com/135669.html?thread=94199285#t94199285

[EDIT: http://www.spamhaus.org/Sbl/sbl.lasso?query=SBL104433 an example of the complaints filed against LJ.]

How significant is this development? I'm not sure about the technical aspects, but is it possible this has something to do with the notifications problem?

Feeling upset about this, some paid users are having a petition thing here:

http://enabeans.livejournal.com/11459.html

I'm surprised some people have this many paid accounts.

Comments

[foxfirefey]

I took it to mean that the problems with the third party is the blacklisting at Spamhaus--it could mean that email notifications are getting blocked as a result of the listing, and it is a third party that can affect notifications (which as far as I know are still done in house--although icons are served by a CDN as far as I know).

[charmian]

Hmm, I see. It seems pointless to deny that the third party is Spamhaus when it is already known, however; and even if it would be inadvisable to publicly identify them, they could at least generically allude to the problem. However, if they haven't resolved it after over a week, I wonder how much longer it's going to take.

[ursamajor]

I hope the users posting to that petition who are planning to not renew their paid accounts are thinking about the difference between a plus account and a basic account - and the idea of picking up stakes and moving elsewhere. I don't think paid vs. plus matters very much to LJ management - they're still getting money from somewhere for that account. And even basic accounts still represent "general traffic" to LJ that they can use as "potential eyes" to get more advertising companies to shell out.

I feel sorry for LJ Support, because I can't imagine being in their position now. LJ upper management in its various forms has burnt through so much goodwill, and LJ Support gets to deal with the front-line flak.

I do feel like the users are being a little unfair in terms of the copypastaed response - when you've got hundreds of requests about the exact same thing that you have to get through in an extremely short period of time, there's only so much personalization that can be done. And given the economics of paid accounts vs. plus accounts, my money's on paid users not being perceived by LJ as worthy of "special treatment" above and beyond the site features they have access to. They get the exact same level of support as everybody else, and there's no way for the average volunteer submitting a support response to know, "This person has 10 paid accounts, not just one."

I admit strong curiosity as to how many people still submit answers in LJ Support now - and what the paid staff to volunteer proportion is.

I also admit strong curiosity about http://www.livejournal.com/stats/stats.txt and the "updated_last1" variable, which IIRC is the number of accounts that have updated their LJ in the last day. That #'s been around the 170k-180k mark this week, but leapt up to over 200k today. Regardless, when there are 30 million accounts, and just over half a percent of them have updated in the last day, 2% in the last week, and 4% in the last month ... that seems incredibly tiny.

[charmian]

Well, I don't know; is a plus account really that lucrative compared to a paid account? Unless the journal has really high traffic, I would suspect not. I wonder if the Plus accounts are profitable in and of themselves. (in terms of ad revenue-costs of supporting Plus account).

Yeah, although for this, I don't think there's really anything to do but to send a canned response in Support.

I think it's really exacerbated by all of the Frank and Meme stuff. If people saw only a few comments about notifications, and the staff responding to those, when they looked at the comments section, they might not want to comment again. But when they see a sea of comments not related to the problem, they might feel more of a desire to comment.

I don't think people are expecting that Paid users get more Support services than non-paid users, though?

http://www.livejournal.com/support/help.bml I guess you could look here to see?

[ursamajor]

I'm not sure what the difference in financial value is of a plus account to a paid account, but I would definitely think that both are perceived as having higher value than basic accounts. I suspect my husband would have a better idea since he had to study this stuff for his business degree, whereas I tend to run screaming from it. ;) I *feel* like the money LJ gets from advertisers for plus accounts results in more profit for them than what they get from paid accounts (since paid accounts have access to more features and especially more site-load-heavy features), but I don't have the numbers to back me up on this.

for this, I don't think there's really anything to do but to send a canned response in Support.

I totally agree, and think that it's a bit naive of enabeans to believe otherwise. ("Anyone who expresses a concern that livejournal just doesn't care, have been getting a form reply that has been copy pasted word for word, as though the commenters are too stupid to notice.") I certainly can't blame her for being angry about the notifications issue, though.

Frank and Meme took away any value I found in LJ News - that of being updated on site happenings and new features.

[charmian]

Certainly.. My suspicion is that the plus account is going to get much less revenue than paid, because not all of the Plus account features are heavy site load, and the ads that LJ has are just really.... not very lucrative at all, I hear. I actually wonder how many Basic accounts there are, anyway, and also Basic accounts also get ads placed on them, for logged out users.

Well, I guess she can be angry about it, but in another sense, we don't know if LJ can really be criticized as 'negligent' w/r/t the problem, since sometimes there are problems that are difficult to solve.

Yeah, they have really made LJ news suck. It's not so much the story, but the whole "comment to get a free LJ gift" thing.

[charmian]

Responding to your edit:

Hmm, that is a good question. I know that awhile back they were looking for new volunteers, but currently they don't really seem to be that backlogged.

There probably are 30 million accounts because of the amount of spam accounts out there, and also because LJ has existed for ten years and churned through a lot of users. Historically, with any site, the amount of accounts just keeps increasing over time, since many people don't delete their accounts.

[frogspace.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure about the technical aspects, but is it possible this has something to do with the notifications problem?

Yes. The last notification I got was nine days ago. I just switched to a Gmail account and set it to forward all mail to my regular account and suddenly the problem is solved, notifications are back.

[frogspace.livejournal.com]

Oops. That was meant as a reply to charmian's post. Sorry! ^^

[azurelunatic]

I'm bringing my history as a domain-atrix to the table here.

Spamhaus is one of the major providers who maintains blacklists; the domains-'n'-more outfit that I worked for, a little shop based in Scottsdale, AZ, subscribed to their blacklists to filter spam before it hit their users' inboxes. Now, that was only for people who had email hosted through them or forwarded through their mail servers, not everybody who had a domain there had email through them, but that is still a substantial chunk of their domains who would not be getting LJ email. And other places subscribe to them as well.

So people who have not been getting their notifications since a certain amount of time (however long their email provider took to retrieve fresh records from Spamhaus) after that record went in, that is the first cause I would think of.

Diagnostics for that would be pretty easy: get in touch with your email provider (well, first track down where it is, if you're not sure) and ask if they use a Spamhaus blacklist. If so, boom.

This will absolutely affect emailed notifications.

I don't know what effect this would have on inbox notifications, because I don't know how much the effects of the blacklist are gumming up LJ's email servers, and what sort of effect a gummed-up email server would have on the inbox notification process.

kareila suggests http://www.livejournal.com/tools/recent_comments.bml as a resource for LJ users, which will at least get them comments in their own journals.

[charmian]

Oooh, an expert opinion! :D

Hmm, now THAT is definitely a factor, then. And since Spamhaus has had it up since 3/2, that is over a week, that is a pretty long time. I have been having some issues with people not replying to my comments, so maybe this is the cause.

[azurelunatic]

I am recommending the only thing I can think of that is likely to actively help that users can do, which is to report any and every spammer they can find through the "report a bot" page.

Gmail seems to be sailing along just fine.

[charmian]

Yeah, I use gmail, and I haven't had any problems.

I wonder why all of a sudden the spambots became a problem, since LJ has had tons of spammers for ages. What could it be that LJ needs to do? Certainly, many social media sites are already full of spammers.

[azurelunatic]

There's the "Again" in that block record, which implies that this is not the first time LJ has been in trouble for this.