The reason behind LJ temporarily banning Tor

[charmian]

For awhile, LJ banned Tor because a site which had been banned from accessing LJ was using Tor to circumvent the ban. What was this site?

It was a site known as Lj2rss. This site would take your LJ name and password and I think, output an RSS of your friends page. The site was banned for two reasons a) making too many requests (hitting the servers too much, I guess), and b) providing a paid service to users, which is against TOS.

At first, I was confused by the news that an RSS of the friends page is considered a paid service. I was aware that you could use an S1 hack to get an RSS of your friends page if you were a paid user, but I wasn't aware that this was considered a paid feature which LJ really doesn't want external services to provide.

From the email that LJ sent the site owner: "we have determined that your service provides a feature and function in violation of our site policies. As stated in the following FAQ, RSS feeds of a users' friends page are only available to Paid and Permanent users [http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=149]. Your service is therefore bypassing an account-level restriction for a feature provided by LiveJournal, and is in violation of our Terms of Service"

Huh. I didn't know this was considered so important a feature. You can of course read your flist as individual authenticated RSS feeds; however, this is rather unwieldy and it is more efficient to have one feed. But why is one banned and the other not? What's the big deal about that? Also, how was the circumvention managed? No matter what, a non-paid account can't access custom layers, right? So how did they do something which only paid users can manage? (This seems to be the code, but I don't know programming so I don't understand it)

Also, what does this possibly mean for Dreamwidth's planned authenticated friends-list reading feature? Hopefully it will not fall afoul of whatever strictures LJ has related to this.

Comments

[elena]

I've used OPML files moving feeds around with Bloglines and Google Reader, and it works quite well (except for Google reader not letting me rearrange the feed floders, but whatever). YMMV.

Then again, I use Google Reader mainly for reading blogs, and I'm not that concerned about not getting friendslocked LJ entries in my feed list.

[charmian]

I've found those are faster than desktop readers, actually. Probably the reason Gregarious was slow was because I was running it off my own webhosting.

Google reader and bloglines don't allow authenticated RSS, so that doesn't help folks. If it weren't for the authenticated feeds, I think it would be relatively trivial to create an aggregate RSS feed of your flist (or filters thereof) using Yahoo Pipes or some similar service.

http://www.tothepc.com/archives/10-tools-to-combine-mix-blend-multiple-rss-feeds/

The problem really is the authenticated RSS feeds and the lack of support for that.

[elena]

Gregarius pulls all feeds in a row only when you tell it to update, so yeah, it is really slow. Online feed readers like Google Reader set scheduled jobs to update feeds according to the frequency they are updated (IIRC), and cache the results, apart from hardware/software capabilities that you don't get at a non-professional webhosting (server cluster, load balancing, whatever). That's why you don't see the lag you get with Gregarius.

I have Gregarius hosted at my domain, too, but I guess any day now I'll delete it and read everything from Google Reader. It's somewhat redundant now.

[charmian]

Yeah, and that's why people don't feel that anything other than Google Reader, Bloglines, etc., is up to snuff. (and besides, the trend is to do everything in the cloud nowadays.) That's why you have people willing to even do dangerous things like strip feeds of their authentication in order to read using Google Reader. I've been googling and it seems that's the solution people are generally using; using freemyfeed or Yahoo Pipes to aggregate the authenticated feeds.

[elena]

I think that defeats the very purpose of friendslocking things Ô_ó

[charmian]

Well, this usually gives an secret URL which isn't easily derivable, and if they set it as non-shared on google reader, probably no data will leak out, but that's a probability. It's sort of like the method posterous uses for the RSS of its private blogs.