Charmian's Journal

Have managed to post a bit more on http://notesonleaves.tumblr.com these days. I have gotten up to volume 9 of Onmyouji, and after that I skimmed through the rest and went "So Seimei has a Super Saiyan mode AND there are random flashbacks to Ancient Egypt and Greece. However the art is even more stunning than ever." (http://notesonleaves.tumblr.com/tagged/onmyouji/chrono to see it all in order)

So after I finish rereading Slam Dunk I plan to go and start blogging about The Ravages of Time. (there seem to be actually some fans on Tumblr)

http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Ftema.livejournal.com%2F1021672.html

Biggest difference is probably in the inbox and the look of the comments.

The head of Livejournal Russia has changed: the new person in charge is Ilya Dronov, who is igrick.livejournal.com, previously in charge of development. In his first post since his appointment, he discusses (google translate link) LJ Abuse Prevention, and future plans.

Also, Anton Nossik, who formerly worked for LJ Russia, has returned to SUP, and is now Media Director of SUP Media. He has given some hints (google translate link) about the future direction of LJ. Apparently there will be an upgrade of the engine, increase of site speed for Russian users, redesign of interfaces, 3rd party apps, more mobile, more template flexibility, etc. Apparently more details will be forthcoming when the project is officially announced.

BTW, could anyone who speaks Russian explain the part that is translated by google "Razrulivanie problems associated with conflicts of creators and moderators of the communities at the expense of the most distinct separation of management rights / ownership"?

Release 83 is now live, which is mostly updates to the Rich Text update page. There seem to be a lot of bugs associated with this, however.

Also, there are some hints about what will be released in v. 84, which is scheduled for early September. Also, the Scrapbook II code has been uploaded, but due to some technical issues, beta testing hasn't started yet.

As far as I can figure out via Google Translate (anyone who can speak Russian, please help?) in v. 84 there will be:

Improved calculation of ratings (I think this is an RU-side feature only?) which will be better at calculating which things are truly popular.
Ability to create pending records for journals and comms (Is this a drafts feature? Might be http://changelog.livejournal.com/11284213.html or http://changelog.livejournal.com/11284531.html)
Some kind of self-promotion thing (I think this has been mentioned in changelog)
Remaking the comments form (I think this is what it's saying?)
m.livejournal.com can resize images on the fly
Something about SMS and personal messages/notifications

I've heard that more Russian speakers are using DW, and reportedly some English-speakers are complaining about it. They don't like the way that the Latest Posts page is not 100% English.

Actually, I think an influx of Russian users is not only not bad, but potentially a good thing for DW. The growth of English-speaking users IMHO seemed to have had plateaued prior to the recent DDoS. With a new group of users coming in, there's the potential for viral growth there as well. There seem to be at least 2K of Russian users, although I'm not sure how much that is relatively. However, growth may be limited by the fact that the site and its documentation are all in English.

http://igrick.livejournal.com/510012.html (Russian language link)

From what I can understand via machine translation, he gives more details on the DDoS attacks and says that it has stopped for the moment, but they are still continuing the mitigation procedures. He also talks about the origin of the attacks, and the wording of the English language message about the DDos, which seems to have upset/confused some Russian speaking users.

[Some of the content in these posts is similar to this post on SUP's official webpage: http://www.sup.com/en/news_359.html]

http://igrick.livejournal.com/510275.html (also Russian language)

He also wrote a post about how there were lots of 500 and 503 errors while posting as a side effect of the mitigation. He says that there may be fewer errors when posting with an app using xml-rpc api. (For example, the iphone/ipad/android apps)

http://igrick.livejournal.com/511301.html (again, Russian language)

This seems to have a scan of an official communication written by SUP. At the end, if google translate is rendering this correctly, he's saying that there will be two weeks compensation for paid users.

Anyone out there who speaks Russian know what the scan says?

http://changelog.livejournal.com/11009393.html.

It says "Creare RSS feed for friends page." Anyone know what it means from the code?

http://technology.posterous.com/announcing-a-new-api-for-developers-to-plug-i

Posterous has announced a new API which will let developers create Posterous-powered sites on their own domains, and allow them to add users on those sites.

http://posterous.com/api

Documentation here. No idea how this works, but it sounds pretty neat.

Meanwhile, on Wordpress.com you can now post comments using Twitter or Facebook:

http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2011/06/07/post-comments-twitter-facebook/

http://asylums.insanejournal.com/announcements/83654.html?thread=4290758#t4290758

Above link has more details about the reasons behind Insanejournal's decision to institute a purge: financial and spam problems.

In other news, a majority of respondents to the "should identity accounts be allowed to post on DW comms" poll answered yes. In the comments foxfirefey points out there are some spam concerns with this. Spam is a big threat the the finances of a Web 2.0 site, so that's definitely a big issue.

Thinking more about the openID/identity account issue, I noticed that many people who opposed the change in that LJ thread cited "commitment" to LJ itself as being important. People may believe that such "commitment" to LJ means that the user is less likely to be a troll, yet wouldn't a really dangerous troll be the sort to put in more effort into their trolling? But does using an openID account mean that you are inherently a suspect character? Couldn't it be just indicative of not wanting to remember another login? What if you simply see no benefit in having a journal at LJ/DW? Now, on DW, it could mean that the person has no idea how to get an invite code, or just doesn't see any point in becoming a DW user because all they want to do is comment: however, I don't think that would make the person suspect.

I think there are more people who use LJ in this way, and thus have little need for anything other than an identity account. Personally, I often see many users who seem to have accounts solely to participate in communities, and with largely blank journals. If this describes more and more of the LJ clientele, it has consequences for LJ's financial model. And, if many people see LJ not as "site where I have a journal and talk to friends" but "where Community X is hosted," that's a significant change in usage, too.

In the latest release, LJ has now allowed for identity accounts (openID, Facebook, Twitter, and others) to post in LJ communities. While this new feature has been overshadowed by the LJ nav strip revision, it seems to have already caused some controversy.

Personally, I'm for this feature (although I don't think that it'll affect me personally much); I really don't think there's much of a security issue with Twitter/FB accounts posting, and actually I'm puzzled by the assertion that LJ-Abuse has less data on the identity accounts than other accounts. I mean, isn't LJ Abuse able to trace even anonymous posters through IP addresses and other things? Anyone with more technical knowledge want to chime in on those aspects?

I now wonder, though, if Dreamwidth is going to implement a similar feature, and if so, would there also be this kind of opposition?