grahambinns.com

A big sorry to the LiveJournal users who just got spammed by a double-post from the photo feed. The hack that I wrote to pull the Flickr feed into the blog post stream isn't smart enough to cope with the idea that an image might change (though in this case I don't think it could have been avoided).

Ah well, we live, we learn. We should learn not to hack at things willy nilly. But it's so much fun.

You'll all remember, no doubt, the fuss that kicked up when Livejournal owners SixApart started censoring and disabling journals based on some fairly specious grounds (and which, eventually, led to them back-pedalling at great speed).

Well. dear reader, it looks like it's happening again. From CNet:

The most recent saga over user-generated Harry Potter artwork appears to have started late last week, when at least two users, "ponderosa121" and "elaboration," reported receiving notices from a LiveJournal abuse team member who informed them that their accounts had been "permanently suspended." (One user tracking the situation says an "undetermined" number of other Harry Potter artists have also been suspended in recent weeks, but we've yet to get official confirmation on that.)

The reason for the deletions? The users' journal entries contained "drawings depicting minors in explicit sexual situations," which represented a violation of LiveJournal's policies, according to copies of the letters posted by their recipients.

Let's hope it takes less time to sort out this time around.

LiveJournal have restored the non-problem accounts out of the ones that they suspended:

The class of suspensions that are being reversed are:

1. All Fandom journals
2. All fiction journals
3. All journals who that had problems in their profile only

Good. Now all I need to do is figure out why they've stopped updating my syndicated RSS feed.

SixApart CEO Barak Berkowitz has apologised for the LiveJournal account suspension screw-up that I posted about yesterday. Also in the news post linked to above are details of why the screw-up happened and what they're doing to resolve the problem.

Interestingly, the section of the post that details LiveJournal's rationale for account suspension has parts of the text struck through and replaced with more moderate language. For example:

... As such, we intended to  have suspend reported journals that do not clearly and substantially object to these a reasonable person would think supported these activities. while at the same time portraying them.

This is certainly an interesting way to approach detailling the original problem; at least we can see here what they were thinking and where they believe they went wrong.

Berkowitz ends with an answer - and thankfully an honest one - to the question "Will you make these mistakes again?":

I’m sure we will. These policies are hard to define and harder to enforce consistently. We are trying to walk a fine line between our love of free speech and our desire to protect children and others. The vast majority of these issues are clear but there will be time we make the wrong call, we will try hard to correct our mistakes faster  and not make them on such a big scale but I’m sure we will make them.

Here's hoping that they think hard about how to proceed before going through the same rigmarole the next time something like this comes up.

Readers will probably by now have heard about the whole shitstorm that's happening regarding Warriors For Innocence and SixApart/LiveJournal at the moment. If you haven't, this BoingBoing post summarises pretty much the whole thing, along with giving responses from Warren Ellis which I'll get to in a second.

Whilst I don't have any children and therefore can't speak with the kind of emotional backing that Warren uses here, I do appreciate it and, insofar as it is possible for me to do so (which is to say rationally rather than empathically), understand it. On the other hand, as Warren further elaborates in a later post, LiveJournal's response has been shoddy and misguided at best, blinkered and grossly over-reactive at worst.

Therefore, for what little difference it makes to the world at large (which is to say probably none at all, true), I shall no longer be making any updates through my LiveJournal account until the situation is resolved, for the simple reason that I cannot support a system that behaves in the manner that LiveJournal has behaved (see the BoingBoing link above for full details; they explain it much better than I do). The irony that I have already paid for my account for the next n months is not lost on me, but the least I can do at this point is stop using LiveJournal until the situation is in some way resolved.

As I said, I can understand the point of view of those people who believe that LiveJournal/SixApart were right to remove the journals and communities whose nature was decidedly dodgy, but you can't just tar everyone with the same brush because of how they list their interests. I have seen in the past on LiveJournal some excellent communities and groups dedicated to the survival of the very things that Warriors For Innocence are ostensibly trying to protect people against, and to remove them because you're too short-sighted not to is downright stupid.