Taxon OOC

SERIOUSLY THIS IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE FRIENDING MEME

Earlier tonight, Livejournal began suspending accounts in bunches. A lot of them have been RP accounts, some recent and some unused in years.

Right now, it's possible that this is associated with accounts logging in through third party services (LJ Login/LJ Juggler/Deepest Sender/etc.) and an attempt by LJ to run a script suspending all possible spambots. It could also be unrelated to that and a matter of suspending journals on certain server clusters or with specific emails or ISPs.

To be extra safe, we suggest everyone disable any third party add-ons that access LJ's login system. If you do have a journal suspended, open a support request right away; hopefully it will get unsuspended as soon as LJ admins can get to it.

To access your saved LJ passwords in Firefox:
→ in the menu bar, select Tools > Options > Security > Saved Passwords
→ select the 'show passwords' option
→ copy all the passwords to RP accounts to a notepad .txt file

Should any of you have one of your Taxon journals suspended, please let us mods know. Between the time of the suspension and the time it gets unsuspended, feel free to make a quick backup journal and we'll approve your join requests so you can continue playing around these unfortunate and frustrating circumstances.

We'll do our best to keep this post updated for you with edits and in the comments as we find out more about what's going on. ♥


ETA (3/19 4:20pm): From a comment by LJ Staff member bluemeringue, "As you know, we've been working very hard to eliminate spam accounts to resolve the notifications issue. Unfortunately, we eliminated too many accounts. If you file a support request, the incorrectly suspended accounts will be unsuspended. We are creating new criteria to evaluate spam accounts. I will provide more details in the next newsletter."

It's also been mentioned (in a comment on the news post I can't find right now, sob) that they aren't releasing the criteria for why and how accounts get put up for suspension as bots. Once I know, though, I'll be sure to edit this post with the information.


ETA (3/19 9:00pm): Got a reply from an LJ Staffer on the situation!

This comment by astronewt: "These suspensions were performed on a variety of criteria, such as creation location, volume, and so on. Over a quarter of a million accounts were suspended in the past day, to put it in perspective -- of these, only a very small percentage (far less than even 1%) were legitimate journals.

It is true that RPG journals did receive a disproportionate number of the suspends that happened to 'real' journals. This was not in any way related to the fact they were RPG journals themselves, though, if that makes sense -- we don't have any problem with RPG journals, they weren't 'targeted' or anything. RPG account behavior can simply be very, very similar to spam journal behavior, unfortunately. RPG'ers often create hundreds of accounts in a row, from the same IP, tied to the same email address, and so on, which is almost indistinguishable by an automated system from spam activity. (Human pre-review of all suspensions simply isn't possible in the scale we're working with here -- to pre-review even a few thousand journals would take a live person an immense amount of time. To pre-review a quarter million? It simply couldn't ever be done.)

We've already taken the data gathered from this round of suspensions (for the false positives) and adjusted our criteria so that the next round of suspensions will be more accurate and catch even fewer legitimate journals. No automated system capable of finding and suspending hundreds of thousands of spam journals can ever be 100% accurate and never, ever catch a real journal -- but we obviously want the number of real journals that are caught to be as absolutely close to zero as we can make it. I totally understand how annoying it is to have a legit journal suspended, if only for a few hours; we want to make sure that happens as few times as possible for people as we continue to root out and get rid of the spam journals."

And this comment, also by astronewt: "I can confirm that these suspensions had nothing to do with the use of any browser add-ons of any kind, whether for Firefox or Chrome or anything else."

IN CONCLUSION: It's safe to use third-party services to access LJ, and suspensions were based on a number of criteria aimed at spambots. Real journals are still getting caught up in this, so if your journal does get suspended just open up a support ticket (linked above) and they'll unsuspend your accounts ASAP.