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The reason behind LJ temporarily banning Tor
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.
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.