Things from Russian LJ

[charmian]

Looking at Russian LJ is pretty interesting. However, I can't speak Russian and am not v. up on current events and contemporary culture in Russia, so there is a lot I don't understand. For one thing, a lot of people don't subscribe to the Russian news comm (ru_news), and there are remarkably few comments there. 0_o Why is this so? Also, there is another comm (lj_ru_support) which seems to function as a combined PSA/maintenance/suggestions comm. The comm is moderated, but has 2000+ members who can post asking for help or suggesting things. Wow, if this was on English language LJ, that comm would be chaos.

This is a post talking about the bug where when you turn off images in Firefox, indentation in comment threading is lost. I have often wondered why this is so; I hope someone does submit a patch and fixes this.

Also, is this for real? Or is a satire/joke? If it is for real, it claims that the user asked SUP for permission to run his own advertising on his LJ, and SUP sent him an agreement to sign as part of their trial program.

This news article also claims that SUP will allow Cyrillic users to advertise in their LJs. SUP will be willing to work with external advertising agencies.

There are follow up articles here and here. The second article is difficult to read through the machine translation; however, it does have some interesting facts. On Russian LJ, the average user is a twenty-six year old male, for example.

Another article on Russian LJ, which I really don't understand, but which may be connected to the above events. It also seems that there is covert advertising going on in Russian LJ against LJ rules. (By which I gather that people are flouting LJ's rules and running ads in secret anyhow?)

Comments

[matgb]

creating a table and forcing table cell size with a transparent .gif background

*headdesk*

Um, yeah, g'luck. Makes me really glad I always use custom comment pages, I can change anything with CSS or a layer hack.

@Charmian: On LJ, I wouldn't mind being able to host my own ads and display them, if I had a journal with a setting that showed people I was doing it (I semi proposed it once to someone). My journal is a fairly successful mainstream UK blog (not intentionally but), and being able to advertise stuff on there would be useful.

However, I proposed it as an option for people who paid for a 'blogging' bolt on that would support a stats package, pingbacks, pinging multiple servers and similar—crucially, I'd replace the ljuser gif with something different, probably colour, in the same way that partner comms do.

But on DW, no interest, an ad free service is just that, I'll put images up for campaigns I'm supporting but that's about it.

[charmian]

I think some people would find that useful on English language LJ as well; well, those who have a blog that people actually want to advertise on.

In some ways, though, I guess it was in LJ's interest to discourage such customers: they would be broadcasting to a large audience who doesn't want to blog themselves, such readers may be unlikely to get LJ accounts, and the site would rack up huge server bills.