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

[foxfirefey]

I took it to mean that the problems with the third party is the blacklisting at Spamhaus--it could mean that email notifications are getting blocked as a result of the listing, and it is a third party that can affect notifications (which as far as I know are still done in house--although icons are served by a CDN as far as I know).

[ursamajor]

I hope the users posting to that petition who are planning to not renew their paid accounts are thinking about the difference between a plus account and a basic account - and the idea of picking up stakes and moving elsewhere. I don't think paid vs. plus matters very much to LJ management - they're still getting money from somewhere for that account. And even basic accounts still represent "general traffic" to LJ that they can use as "potential eyes" to get more advertising companies to shell out.

I feel sorry for LJ Support, because I can't imagine being in their position now. LJ upper management in its various forms has burnt through so much goodwill, and LJ Support gets to deal with the front-line flak.

I do feel like the users are being a little unfair in terms of the copypastaed response - when you've got hundreds of requests about the exact same thing that you have to get through in an extremely short period of time, there's only so much personalization that can be done. And given the economics of paid accounts vs. plus accounts, my money's on paid users not being perceived by LJ as worthy of "special treatment" above and beyond the site features they have access to. They get the exact same level of support as everybody else, and there's no way for the average volunteer submitting a support response to know, "This person has 10 paid accounts, not just one."

I admit strong curiosity as to how many people still submit answers in LJ Support now - and what the paid staff to volunteer proportion is.

I also admit strong curiosity about http://www.livejournal.com/stats/stats.txt and the "updated_last1" variable, which IIRC is the number of accounts that have updated their LJ in the last day. That #'s been around the 170k-180k mark this week, but leapt up to over 200k today. Regardless, when there are 30 million accounts, and just over half a percent of them have updated in the last day, 2% in the last week, and 4% in the last month ... that seems incredibly tiny.

[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.