Anonymous comments are now off

[nameandnature]

I was getting too much spam, so I've turned off anonymous comments. LJ's anti-spam system was correctly flagging a lot of it, but I can't help feel that it should just bin the more obvious stuff (with a rejection message so humans know what happened).

LJ's code base being what it is, this may also disallow logins via OpenID and TwitonMyFaceSpace, I'm not sure.

I'm still planning on moving away from LJ as soon as I get some spare hours to do it in.

Comments

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

Dreamwidth make this easy: tools are on the site.

[liv]

Much as I love DW, I don't think it provides the features pw201 is describing here. Spam is still being handled manually, just as with LJ, you click to report while deleting the offending comments and then DW eventually bans the bots. There's no system available which can auto-delete the most obvious spam without you having to see it and go through the steps.The volume of spam is relatively smaller but that's purely because the site is a small target. I suspect it's only a matter of time. Just as here, you can't block anon comments without also blocking OpenID from other sites.

(Also I know from previous conversations that pw201 objects to DW on the grounds of the site being Overrun with Feminists, but that's not a technical issue.)

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

Thanks, I should've clarified that: DreamWidth make it easy to transfer off of LJ, complete with history and comments.

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

Also... Overrun with feminists. Can't say I'd noticed. I guess that's a matter of perception.

Taking a serious point, I hear - but have no hard evidence to back it up - that there's a big gender divide in social use of the Web, with some forums and platforms seeing "Women leaving in droves" in 2004-2005.

The quoted phrase seems to crop up, without hard attribution or hard numbers, in discussions of the Google+ names debacle - a policy which seems guaranteed to deter participation by women who see anonymity or pseudonyms as an essential cordon sanitaire between real life (and really unpleasant or dangerous behaviours like stalking) and the vitriolic, personal tone of what passes for comment on unmoderated political forums.

It is, of course, entirely possible that any social forum on the net would seem 'Overrun with feminists' if anything near half of the 'serious' political and economic discussions engaged confident and articulate women - if viewed from an Internet or a 'social bubble' where every other forum had ended up as a male preserve with women feeling so unwelcome - or finding the tone so distasteful - that that they have all departed so that it is exceptional to hear a female voice.

...Or that labelling someone who happens to be politically-engaged and female 'feminist' is just another form of ad hominem response in the debased 'debate' that passes for political discourse. I have no idea how you or I would respond to anyone who considers that term an insult; I guess that the only response to a forum in which it's considered an effective riposte that serves to discredit a contributor is to disengage.

[nameandnature]

livredor is paraphrasing ever so slightly: my previous LJ flounce posting does indeed say that DW "seems to be intended for people who enjoy mannerist identity politics and writing about how their fanfiction in which Snape vigorously rogers Harry Potter will inevitably smash the kyriarchy" but then I also add "But seriously, Dreamwidth is in active development and they're doing some cool stuff, though I'm a bit worried they'll run out of money. I don't want to move again, so I'm looking for somewhere stable, preferably under my own domain" and furthermore "Actually, there's nothing wrong with DW being as I described if it also has the facilities I want. But what I'd really like to do is have more of a "proper" blog, and Wordpress seems to have the facilities for that. I'm currently providing a bunch of things (comment feeds, pingbacks) via evil Python scripts: it'd be nice to find some software which just did that."

Liv is right to say that DW is technically no better than LJ for the features I'm interested in. DW has smaller spam problem because the spammers aren't really trying hard, probably because it's too small for them to care about.

[gareth-rees.livejournal.com]

You'll find that turning anonymous comments off only diminishes the spam. I turned anonymous comments off years ago and I still get comment spam once a week or so.

LiveJournal is dead, sadly. It was nice while it lasted.

[nameandnature]

LiveJournal is dead, sadly. It was nice while it lasted.

I think it's probably dead as a blogging platform, but I'm not going to abandon it entirely, I'll probably just stop posting publicly. There are still people posting stuff here that I want to read, under friends locks. People still tend to write more on LJ than they do on, say, Facebook, both because the default format allows for longer postings (Facebook has Notes, but they're hardly used) and because the privacy controls on LJ are easier. Google Plus could supplant LJ in time, I suppose: it seems to allow longer posts and the privacy controls are much more obvious than LJ's.

[gareth-rees.livejournal.com]

The lack of pseudonymity will prevent Google Plus from being a LiveJournal-killer, I think. It has the right kind of privacy controls, but not the right kind of identity.

Opportunity for someone.

[campylobacter.livejournal.com]

WordPress is by far the technically superior, more user-friendly blogging platform (along with its anti-spam service Akismet), but moving the bulk of the English-speaking LJ members to it who use LJ primarily as a social network for pseudonymous fandom activities will only be effectuated by a major LJ catastrophe -- perhaps a third DDoS in 6-7 months?

I'm seeing more of a shift to Tumblr for multimedia fannnish interaction, and a migration to Google+ as an alternate to Facebook.

As for feminists, I love them and would never confuse them with fanfic writers of male/male porn who have privileged, heteronormative, monosexual entitlement issues.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Interesting. All the spam I get is anonymous - but I take it that disabling anonymous comments changes that? If so I should turn it back on.