LJ cynicism; stats have arrived

[charmian]

To be honest, following the gender sign up/profile debacle, I wonder if the lesson LJ/SUP is going to take is that they should make the LJ changelog comm locked. /cynical

Well, thankfully they did roll-back, and they are now saying that they will never do this in the future, so we'll see what happens. Am also kind of surprised to see that a user rep has actually talked to LJ users, and is apparently working on some kind of status report (not related to this).

Anyway, I also noticed that after the limericks comm, LJ has now come up with a new idea: tmi_lj, which is supposedly a comm dedicated to group narratives involving TMI (too much information). However, they must be suitable for youth. Which means, predictably, they veer into toilet humor.

However, there DOES seem to be some method behind the madness: there are now new free TMI virtual gifts, which are AdNectar promotions, [note: Paid Perm users see them as Sold Out] and when you click on them, you see some videos (people doing embarrassing things, although I'm not sure the first vid is work safe), which are part of some 3M campaign for privacy films on video screens or something. There is also a link to share the TMI campaign w/ your Facebook friends.

EDIT:

Looks like stats have arrived at LJ
http://www.livejournal.com/statistics/

So far, most of them are only available to paid/perm users. However, the My Guests thing is live. People who have opted out are shown as "invisible guest."

Also, LJ seems to be holding a holiday promotion
http://www.livejournal.com/friends/holidaypromotion.bml

You can only see this if you are a paid/perm user, and what it seems to be is that paid/perm users can send $10 off coupons to Basic/Plus users. The coupons though, cannot be used to extend paid accounts.

Comments

[charmian]

Thanks for the information!

Huh, so the "livejournal" repository is totally not functional alone? That sounds... awkward, from an open source perspective.

Is there a lot of stuff in ljcomint, or are most of the proprietary features in ljcom?

[synecdochic]

It's functional, in a barebones sort of way, but I wouldn't want to try to run a business site on it (as opposed to a hobby site), due to the amount of stuff you need to reinvent. Most of ljcom is business specific and branding stuff: the payment system, renames, vgifts, many styles/layouts, all site schemes past '01 or so, voice posts, TxtLJ, etc, etc, etc. ljcomint is mostly code they can't publish due to partnership agreements (the other half of TxtLJ, for instance), configuration details, and admin/backend type stuff (tools that they didn't want publicised such as the ability for an admin to log into any account, etc) although I'm sure I'm forgetting something.

A lot of what we had to do in the ramp-up to open beta was to rewrite functionality that only existed in ljcom. (We still haven't gotten it all, obviously.) It was made harder by the fact that many of our coders used to have access to ljcomint, so we had to clean-room engineer a lot of vital functionality; we specifically brought in afuna because she'd never had ljcomint access at all.

[charmian]

Very interesting. So most of the user-facing proprietary stuff seems to be ljcom.

[synecdochic]

Yeah -- mostly because most site owners aren't aware of the things they're missing, since they don't know what's in ljcomint to miss it. (There are so many useful admin tools in ljcomint.)

ljcom in LJ's Trac.

Clean room is our list of things that need to be clean-roomed for LJ; most of that is ljcom, but some of it is ljcomint.