more notifications problems at LJ?

[charmian]

http://news.livejournal.com/135669.html?thread=94245621#t94245621

Currently there's a notifications problem at LJ, which apparently has something to do with a third party [EDIT: possibly Spamhaus]. People are getting fairly upset about it in the comments of the news post (well, also because of the banner color scheme).

Also, LJ is currently blacklisted with Spamhaus.

http://news.livejournal.com/135669.html?thread=94199285#t94199285

[EDIT: http://www.spamhaus.org/Sbl/sbl.lasso?query=SBL104433 an example of the complaints filed against LJ.]

How significant is this development? I'm not sure about the technical aspects, but is it possible this has something to do with the notifications problem?

Feeling upset about this, some paid users are having a petition thing here:

http://enabeans.livejournal.com/11459.html

I'm surprised some people have this many paid accounts.

Comments

[azurelunatic]

I'm bringing my history as a domain-atrix to the table here.

Spamhaus is one of the major providers who maintains blacklists; the domains-'n'-more outfit that I worked for, a little shop based in Scottsdale, AZ, subscribed to their blacklists to filter spam before it hit their users' inboxes. Now, that was only for people who had email hosted through them or forwarded through their mail servers, not everybody who had a domain there had email through them, but that is still a substantial chunk of their domains who would not be getting LJ email. And other places subscribe to them as well.

So people who have not been getting their notifications since a certain amount of time (however long their email provider took to retrieve fresh records from Spamhaus) after that record went in, that is the first cause I would think of.

Diagnostics for that would be pretty easy: get in touch with your email provider (well, first track down where it is, if you're not sure) and ask if they use a Spamhaus blacklist. If so, boom.

This will absolutely affect emailed notifications.

I don't know what effect this would have on inbox notifications, because I don't know how much the effects of the blacklist are gumming up LJ's email servers, and what sort of effect a gummed-up email server would have on the inbox notification process.

kareila suggests http://www.livejournal.com/tools/recent_comments.bml as a resource for LJ users, which will at least get them comments in their own journals.

[charmian]

Oooh, an expert opinion! :D

Hmm, now THAT is definitely a factor, then. And since Spamhaus has had it up since 3/2, that is over a week, that is a pretty long time. I have been having some issues with people not replying to my comments, so maybe this is the cause.

[azurelunatic]

I am recommending the only thing I can think of that is likely to actively help that users can do, which is to report any and every spammer they can find through the "report a bot" page.

Gmail seems to be sailing along just fine.

[charmian]

Yeah, I use gmail, and I haven't had any problems.

I wonder why all of a sudden the spambots became a problem, since LJ has had tons of spammers for ages. What could it be that LJ needs to do? Certainly, many social media sites are already full of spammers.

[azurelunatic]

There's the "Again" in that block record, which implies that this is not the first time LJ has been in trouble for this.