I, for one, welcome our new Russian Overlords. Unless you've been living under a rock for the past 24 hours, I am sure that you have heard the news regarding LiveJournal. You're probably wondering why I'm posting about this over here, as this is certainly not LiveJournal! First of all, I want to ensure that everyone is aware of this sale (unlike the previous sale, which some people did not recognize until much later). Information can be found
here!The second point is that I want to ensure all of you that we are committed to maintaining LostJournal, and are pleased that SUP has agreed to maintain the open-source standard for the LiveJournal code. Without the code, LostJournal would not be here!
I wanted to let you guys know that in the coming weeks I will be doing a full code update. This will bring us up to speed with the current version, and will include a lot of shiny new things. This will, however, also bring content flagging to LostJournal. Now, before you force me to walk the plank over this, I ask you all to hear me out! I have gone through the code for content flagging, and there is nothing that can be done to a user's journal without intervention of the administrators, or Abuse team. This means that if someone flag's this journal, all it will do is create a report that most likely I will investigate. More often than not, I will just hit "ignore" and the report will vanish. I am enabling this to make a point: Every major service provider on the web right now HAS flagging of some sort. Go checkout Flickr or YouTube - guess what? They all have content flagging! This does not impede on your rights, nor does it turn users into vigilantes. All this does is allow users to flag a certain profile, comment or entry for administrators to review. I really don't understand why people are screaming bloody murder over this - it's a simple feature, and the people who are reviewing the content are only looking for major, law-breaking offenses. For LiveJournal, the people who are reviewing are the Abuse Prevention Team, which I proudly served on for almost two years before I went back to school. I know the people who are reviewing this content, and I know that they use common sense when evaluating complaints. So please, cut the people over at LiveJournal some slack!
That is all for now. Please feel free to comment!