news

Server coming back up!

Tue, 20 May 2008 03:57:26 GMT

My apologies to everyone for the rampant 404 errors all over the site. Long story short, it's being fixed tonight when I transfer services back to the actual LoJo server(s).

I'm going to be making the DB read-only at approximately 12:00am MDT, and should have it released by 1:00am MDT. The server is up and running right now - I just need to move the database back to the old server and delete the 64-bit caches.

Feel free to yell at me via comments - I know it's been a rough road, but this should be the end of the issues :)

Edit: Done! :D

Migration complete

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 01:16:08 GMT

At approximately 1:30am PDT I moved both web and DB from Calgary to our offsite data facility, where it will sit until the end of the month. After finally figuring out the issue that caused me to back-out the changes, all went smoothly and we are 100% migrated.

A few things to note:
- Sub-domains have *not* been moved. I still need access to the old server, so I cannot move the wildcard DNS entry over to the new server just yet.
- Picture hosting was not moved, and I don't plan on moving it. Looking at the logs, there's really not a lot of traffic hitting it, so I'm leaving it as-is.

If there are any issues or concerns, feel free to poke at me.

A few communities to take note of, and a contest (of sorts)

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 20:04:54 GMT

Just another friendly news post from your friendly admin!

In an attempt to move some site-related discussion away from the news area, I would like to invite those who are reading this to join the following communities and take part in any discussions that interest you!

The one I would like to "promote" the most is the recent-created lojo_design community. This is a community which I intend to solicit new design idea's for all areas of the site. I will be posting a pseudo-contest in this community in a little bit, so make sure you check it out!

Another community which even I forgot about is releases. As we progress through spring and into summer I will be taking steps to prepare some new releases for LostJournal. Any releases that I would like public input on I will post here so users can have a look at what's to come.

Two communities that impact the overall operation of the site are lojo_backend and lojo_dev. While both communities are closed-communities, I invite you to watch them so you are aware of any changes which may impact the way you visit the site.

The last two communities I would like to let you guys know about is lojo_support and lojo_userdoc. Just as the name implies, lojo_support deals with the customer-support related post on LostJournal, while lojo_userdoc is a community in which documentation (FAQ's, particularity) are discussed. If you are interested in helping write FAQ's, or are interest in the customer support aspect, feel free to join!

Thank you all for your continued support of LostJournal.

Moving date

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 06:12:55 GMT

Hello all,

I have found out today that the location in which I am currently hosting LostJournal.com from will be moving a few blocks down the road on April 18th (my birthday, no less!) Unfortunately, this poses a few problems for both the site and myself.

First is that I will be in Boston from April 12-20th for a conference, and will unlikely be available to physically move the server. The second issue is that the internet will be cut at or around the 15th of April, which really doesn't look good.

Fortunately, I do have access to an offsite server which I have setup for such an emergency. This process is usually something I would do overnight, so there wouldn't be too much of an interruption to the regular site users. Expect this switch-over by at the latest April 1st (the only way you'd be able to tell is instead of humorous Tycho and Brenna icons at the bottom of all pages, you will see "LOJOOFFSITE1" - not so humorous).

I am flying up to Calgary April 23rd to physically move the server and re-build it with the latest release. Once the old server is up and running in a satisfactory manner I will throw the switch and re-direct all traffic to Calgary. I plan to have this done by the 25th.

So, honestly, there shouldn't be an interruption of great magnitude over the next few weeks. I just wanted to put this up there that *if* something were to not go quite right, that there is some advance notice.

Thank you all for you consideration, and I look forward to getting through the next few weeks without a hitch.

-Steve

PSA

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 02:33:19 GMT

A few points:

- Those that were experiencing issues viewing their friends page *should* be able to view them now. I have identified the problem, and after discussing possible resolutions with another LJ-clone sysop I have gone ahead and made the fix. If you feel that you were inconvenienced by this problem, please leave me a comment and I will give you 2 months of paid account for free.

- As many of you are aware, LiveJournal will no longer allow you to create an account without ads. While the news journal is -not- my area to express my personal opinion, I will just say that I have no intention of following in this decision, and that you may turn on/off ads for any account at any time via the console here at LostJournal. My belief is that if you like LostJournal and want to help the site, you may, at your own discretion, turn on the ads or even buy an account. I will not force users to view ads. That's simply something that I do not agree with, and something that you will never see here at LostJournal.

That's all for now. I am still working with a few errors here and there, but will hopefully have everything resolved by the end of my Spring Break.

Take care all. Comments are enabled so have at it.

Downtime

Sun, 09 Mar 2008 07:08:31 GMT

My apologies for the downtime earlier today. We've been experiencing some database issues lately which ultimately ended up in me dumping all userpics to the hard drive and out of the database. This ended up really confusing our offsite database replicator, and long story short the database was literally shutoff for a good chuck of the day while I banged my head on the desk trying to figure out the issues.

All *should* be back to normal now. I know there are a few lingering DB errors floating around (We're currently working on something...). I'll be investigating these issues once I take a day to decompress as it's the beginning of my spring break.

How's everyone else doing?

No more spam

Sat, 23 Feb 2008 09:45:03 GMT

Just now I pushed live the Captcha system for ALL anonymous comments as well as new accounts. Yes, you heard me correctly - if you are posting anonymously, you will have to enter a Captcha (for the time being).

I know this may be a pain, but please bear with us as we error-out the spam servers. I will probably modify the rules on anonymous comments in 2-3 weeks so normal users can post while spam servers will be denied.

I do apologize to everyone who has experienced the flood of comments. This should hopefully be the solution to our issues.

Power Outage

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 02:20:35 GMT

This morning at 10:20am, Calgary suffered a major power outage affecting nearly 70,000 people. Unfortunately, we were one of the 70,000 people affected. While we have battery backup in place, the outage lasted more than 2 hours and our battery can only last 45 minutes.

Of course no power outage goes perfect when we get power again, and a hard drive decided to die when power was restored. While we can run with a hard drive down, a server cannot boot up when it's missing a drive.

All is good now. Sorry for the interruption.

Give a gift, receive half back!

Wed, 26 Dec 2007 08:02:05 GMT

Yes, you read that correctly! If you give a gift right now through the Paid Accounts center, you will receive half of the dollar amount spent back as a gift certificate! Gift certificates are good for any LostJournal service available through the Paid Accounts center, and they do not expire!

A rule or two:

- If you use a gift certificate to purchase a gift, you will not receive another gift certificate. Seems logical, right?

- You cannot buy a gift for yourself, nor can you buy a paid account for someone who has a permanent account.

Happy Holidays to you all! If there is anything we can do here at LostJournal to improve, please feel free to comment to any news post, or post to suggestions.

Edit: For those of you who have not enabled news notifications, you can subscribe to the news feed on LiveJournal to keep track of what's going on over here!

Best,
Steve

Email

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 18:43:13 GMT

Hi all,

As some of you probably noticed, we had a bit of an issue with emails over the past week. Two things caused this:

- We got spam-bombed which caused out outgoing mail server to lockup
- When I changed the IP address for the outgoing mail server, it did not propagate down to the web servers so instead of sending email to the mail server, it was going to a non-existent server (and bouncing)

I am going to work tonight to get the queued emails out. This may take some time, as they were put into the backup queue which required manual intervention.

Sorry for the hassle. If you've been attempting to validate your email, please go request a new email - it works now.

-Steve

I, for one, welcome our new Russian Overlords.

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 17:41:05 GMT

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!

October

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 06:47:05 GMT

It's October 1st, and like good college students we've been keeping to our studies. Unfortunately, this means that LostJournal has not received the TLC that it deserves.

We want to open this post up to everyone in the form of a sounding board. Is there anything you would like to say to us directly? Are there things we're doing right, wrong (or very wrong)? I know there has been a lot of drama in the blogging industry over the last few months, and I want everyone to know that we are keeping an eye on it.

So please, do let us know if there is anything you would like to say! We are here for you guys!

~Steve and Sam

Userpic upgrades!

Mon, 06 Aug 2007 17:59:04 GMT

Hey all! It's been a while since my last news post and I apologize for that, but I come bearing good news! Many of you have asked, and now you shall receive: as of right now, all account levels have had their maximum userpic limits upgraded!

Free accounts can now upload up to 10 userpics.
Paid accounts can now upload up to 30 userpics.
Permanent accounts can now upload up to 100 userpics!

There is plenty more in the works for the near future, but I wanted to let everyone know about this change as soon as possible so you could start enjoying the higher userpic limits immediately.

Enjoy! :)

Gifts!

Mon, 11 Jun 2007 07:22:59 GMT

Well that didn't take long! After working on this for most of the night, I have made the gift feature open to everyone. Want to buy a paid account for someone else? Head on over to http://www.lostjournal.com/paidaccounts/index.bml and check it out! You can even make the gift anonymous, if you so choose.

A few housekeeping items!

In order to avoid spamming the news journal, I have created the community releases for all new "minor" feature releases. Feel free to head over and join the community.
If you are not a LostJournal member but would like to be, head on over to invite_codes to see if there are any available (for free!).
Please do remember that LostJournal does take considerable time and money to keep up and running. If you're happy with the service you're being provided, you can show your support by upgrading your account. LostJournal will always be free, but we do restrict some features to paid users (including photo hosting, additional userpics and more invite codes).
We appreciate all the support we receive, and in return we hope that we are doing out best to keep everyone happy!

In the interest of increasing our membership, we are preparing a new contest to start in July. While all of the details have not been finalized, I can say that a few permanent accounts will be given as prizes. :)

Thank you everyone, and as always - feel free to comment!

Oh look - an update!

Fri, 08 Jun 2007 10:27:48 GMT

Hello everyone!

I hope that all is well now that we are into summer. I just wanted to post a quick news update to let people know what is going on here at LostJournal.

As a lot of you probably are aware, there is a lot of drama flying around regarding fandom and suspensions. I have received numerous IM's and emails from various users inquiring if LostJournal is at risk of the same thing happening. Here is what our position is:

LostJournal is as susceptible to legal issues as much as every other site out there. If an issue does come up that threatens us legally, we will work to insure that every decision is in the best interest of both the LostJournal community, and as a business. We are a small site, but as I have said to others that have asked - I cannot promise that action will not be taken if we receive a report.

This being said, however, over the past (almost) 2 years that LostJournal has been up and running, we have received 1 report regarding a conflict of some-sort. To be honest - you guys are the most mature and well-behaved bloggers I have ever interacted with. LostJournal is something that I have put blood*, sweat and tears into, and to see what it has become is something that I never imagined. Now that we've covered that, onto the fun stuff!

suggestions is now open to, well, suggestions! Please feel free to post what you would like to see happen on LostJournal. A few things I will clear up before I get 50 posts for the same thing:

Userpics: We know you want more, and we are working to give you more. No, we will never be able to match other sites, but gradually we will increase the limits as we increase our storage space.
Gifts for other users: Yes! Right now it is purely a coding issue, and as soon as we get around this bump it will be live.
Hide friends-of: I am still trying to understand this feature, as it is possible to remove someone from your friends-of list by banning them using the console. Can someone (1 or 2 people, not 50 :) comment and let me know so I can better understand this.
Pictures: We do offer photo hosting built-into LostJournal. It is a paid feature, however, and at this time there is no plan to offer a free version.

That is all for now. Thank you everyone :)

*Servers are sharp and heavy, and moving them usually results in some form of injury

LiveJourbal.net

Sun, 13 May 2007 21:50:35 GMT

Hi all,

As some of you may or may not know, LostJournal.com and LiveJourbal.net are owned and operated by the same company (LostJournal.com). This weekend, LiveJourbal.net went down due to an overlooked domain expiry date. As of right now I have no way of renewing this domain until I contact the previous owner for LiveJourbal.net.

I know a lot of you guys are LjB users too, so I figured this would be the place to let everyone know what's going on. The server is totally fine, so please do not panic! As soon as I can, I will restore access to the site.

Thank you everyone for your patience, and if you have any questions let me know!

-Steve

New Feature!

Sun, 25 Mar 2007 01:14:02 GMT

Over the past 2 months I have been developing a new feature for the entire site. It has taken a lot of hours to get right, and now that I have tested it fully to ensure no errors will occur, I feel safe that I can announce it to everyone.

If you head over to the viewing options page you will see a new scheme labeled "Customize your own!". Click on this scheme and save at the bottom. Once you have enabled this scheme you will have a new option under the manage menu on the left labeled "Scheme". Once at this page you can customize every single color associated with the sidebar (including text and background). You can create up to 5 custom schemes, all of which you can save.

Please understand that this is still the beginning of this feature! In the near future I hope to add a ton of additional settings to this page.

Let me know what you think! If you have any questions please let me know! :)

Code push!

Wed, 21 Mar 2007 19:52:28 GMT

Hi all!

Hopefully by the end of the week I should have a release candidate built and tested. The majority of this release will (FINALLY) automate the payments process. We are still working out some bugs, but I am confident that the script for new account codes and paid accounts is working correctly. I am still working on a method for upgrading userpics; however, there are still a few issues outstanding.

There is one other addition with this release candidate; however, I will wait until it is released before I say anything.

As you may have noticed LostJournal has finally attracted some anonymous spam. If you receive any spam in your journal please use the delete option to mark the comment as spam. Any and all spammers will be banned at an IP level, and I will not reverse any bans - I don't like spamming, and I'm not going to be as nice as some other sites and issue warnings. Spammers are not welcome, and they will be denied access upon first offense. Questions?

As usual, if you have any questions or comments please leave a comment and I will get back to you asap!

Server closet maintenance

Fri, 26 Jan 2007 02:32:01 GMT

Hi all!

Just to let everyone know that this coming Sunday at 2am MST I will be taking down the site in order to perform some server maintenance, as well moving a few things around in the closet. I anticipate this downtime to last no more than an hour. During this time the site will be unavailable. I will try my best to have a temporary page up; however, this outage will affect our router as well so it may not be possible to serve any page during this time.

Thank you for your patience, and if you have any questions please feel free to comment!

-Steve
LostJournal Administrator

Notifications!

Sun, 07 Jan 2007 14:39:06 GMT

Just to let everyone know that I have pushed the notification system live. I am still working out some of the kinks, but for now it all seems to be working as it should.

If you notice any errors please open a support request so I can look into it.

Also, there have been a few issues with outgoing mail. With this latest code push I believe I have resolved the issue that was occurring. Again, if you see any errors at all please open a support request.

Thank you everyone, and enjoy the new shiny :)

We need help!

Thu, 04 Jan 2007 05:17:37 GMT

Hello all!

To keep this short and to the point - LostJournal needs help! While I cannot release all the details right now, we have taken on a -lot- of additional traffic, which unfortunately has resulted in the support board being overrun with spam. The trouble with this is that legitimate requests (such as support and payment requests) are being overlooked.

Because of this issue I would like to "hire" a new member to do a daily or semi-daily sweep of the categories that receive spam and clear them out (there are a few steps involved, but bottom line is that we need to clean up the board).

While this is not a paid position (none of us at LoJo are paid - we volunteer our time), I would like to offer a permanent account to whoever would be willing to do this. Myself and other administrators will do our best to help out, but this new person will be the first line of defense when it comes to cleaning this out.

Preferably I would like to take on someone who has -some- experience with LJ-based support systems, but this is not necessary.

Comments have been screened for this post. Please reply if you are interested, any previous experience you may have, and any additional info you would like to add.

Thank you everyone for your support of LoJo, and please stay tuned as we work on developing new and unique features.

-Steve
LostJournal Administrator

Seasons Greetings!

Sat, 23 Dec 2006 20:21:09 GMT

On behalf of myself, and all of the LostJournal Staff I would like to wish everyone a very Happy Holidays!

Please do take care over the holiday season!

All the best,
Steve & the LostJournal Administration Team :)

Upcoming changes

Mon, 27 Nov 2006 18:56:19 GMT

Just to let everyone know that over the next 2 or 3 weeks we will be making some significant changes to the backend of the site. This may result in some service disruptions and/or quality of service issues.

Please bear with us as we continue to make LostJournal bigger and better than before :).

-Steve

Contest Winners!

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 18:50:12 GMT

It's September 5th, which means that the August invite promotion has drawn to a close. A few stats before I announce the winners!

-550 users participated in this Month's promotion
-1008 new users invited
-3997 total users!

You guys totally rock! And now, onto the winners!

In third place.. prissi
Second place.. zelda
And in first place (once again :) is moonduchess

Great job everyone! We will for sure have another promotion very soon, so stay tuned!

Contest Time!

Tue, 01 Aug 2006 10:18:52 GMT

Alright guys! Due to popular demand we are bringing back the great Invite contest! I am going to recycle the post I made in April as all the same information applies! Just a few notes though:

-Everyone has been given 5 free invite codes. Use wisely!
-You cannot request more codes at this time. We may this change this rule at a later date, but for the current time we will not be answering requests for more codes

Good luck everyone!

--
Starting today (August 1st) we will be tallying every single new member, and who they are invited by. At the end of the Month, we will total up the results, and will award prizes to the users who invite the most people! The Prizes will be as follows:
1st Place - 6 Months Paid Time
2nd Place - 2 Months Paid Time
3rd Place - 1 Month Paid time.

There are a few rules and conditions to this contest:
- Contest begins on August 1st at 12:00:01 AM EDT, and will end on August 31st at 11:59:59 PM EDT.
- Senior Site Volunteers (members of lojo_admin) will be exempt from this contest.
- The Management of this site reserve the right to modify and/or cancel this promotion.

Additionally, there is a BONUS prize available of 1 Month Paid Time! To win the bonus, you must invite the greatest number of people who leave the Advertisements on. This Bonus is separate from the above-mentioned promotion.

Q & A Time!
Question: What if a community I maintain has invite codes that I would like to use. Can I transfer them to myself?

Answer: Yes you can! All invite codes have a special URL which will be sent to the user whom you want to invite (example URL: http://www.lostjournal.com/create.bml?code=4gk8caaaaace). In order to transfer this invite code, you must add &xferto=exampleusername onto the end of the URL (example URL: http://www.lostjournal.com/create.bml?code=4gk8caaaaace&xferto=steve <- Replace with YOUR username). This will move the invite code to your account, and will count towards your tally. Neat, eh? :)

Question: Do communities created within this period count towards my total?

Answer: Unfortunately we must restrict this contest to personal accounts only.

Question: I invited someone in May/June/July - does this count towards my total?

Answer: This contest is for account created between August 1st and August 31st. No other account creations will be included in this tally

Good luck everyone, and I look forward to announcing the results!