Eh? WTF?

[charmian]

http://news.livejournal.com/125326.html?thread=83019150#t83019150

It's not clear exactly what happened here, but why would a staffer choose to make a random comment on an entry using their staff account? How did they even find their journal? As far as I can tell what happened is that the staff person does admit to leaving a comment on an entry which was in 'bad taste' and then deleting it, but then it's unclear whether the entry was locked (as the person alleges) or not (as the staff member alleges).

More disturbing are the allegations made by this person, although they admit to 'trolling' in the past, so they might not be a reliable source. However... do volunteers really have the ability to see locked posts? Or is it only closed support requests?

Comments

[janinedog]

Wow, okay. I need to reply here because you've either not stated some things clearly, or you're mistaken.

Let me say first that I'm speaking from the viewpoint of someone who was a volunteer for LJ, both in public (non-Abuse-related) Support (2002-2004ish) and in Abuse (2004-2005ish). Then I was an employee from the end of 2005 through the beginning of 2009.

First of all, volunteers (non-staff members) definitely did not have the ability to view non-public entries during this time period. A select few staff members did (and still do), though, and a few of those staff members work in Support/Abuse. So that's how they'd be able to investigate requests that involve non-public content--it was handled by staff, not volunteers.

It would definitely be a huge abuse of privs if someone on the Abuse Team allowed you to use their account. That said, there's no way it'd be non-public entries that you were viewing through it, unless it was a staff member's account. And even then, you can only view non-public entries by appending a URL argument to the end of every page you visit (manually, each time you click a link), or by using the "impersonate" feature, which allows select staff members to log into the site as if they were another person. This feature requires typing in your password (again) and is logged (so is the URL argument method).

As for Dreamwidth, it's run by two former employees (and before that, volunteers) of LJ, yes. However, I suggest that you read this entry, written by one of the owners, to learn what is and is not possible, and how DW handles the issue of content privacy.

[christina]

He may have been staff and not a volunteer; it's been 8 years, I can't recall properly.

What I know about the situation was I was being harassed offline and when the person doing it bragged about it in their private LiveJournal, their friends came to me and told me the evidence was in the person's journal, and Abuse would not do anything to help me. The police wanted printouts that day, even though they didn't want to contact LJ because they couldn't publicly see the entries and back then they weren't clear on how a locked journal worked, and so I asked my friend if the entries were there, and he said yes, and I asked if I could print them out, and again, he said yes. I didn't brag around the web, and he no longer is affiliated with LJ. This was in 2003.

[janinedog]

*nods* Well, that's certainly an abuse of privs. But since he's no longer with LJ anymore, then I suppose there's not much to be done about it now.

[christina]

As for the 2005 thing, that was what ultimately got him perma-banned or something like that, because it was for drama. I dunno how it was done, just that I was able to log in another account and view the entries and comments and print them out for the police in order to press charges on the woman who was harassing me off line (changing my mail, posting my unpublished cell phone number, etc.).