Secret Garden

Guess it's my turn now. As I've seen it happened to some of my flist members, my LJ just got hit by anonymous spammer. Some annoying anon posted a comment on an old entry of mine advertising...get this...furniture?!? Not that I want to get spammed, but couldn't I at least get something interesting? How boring am I? (Don't answer that.) Granted, I was talking about "prettifying" my journal's look & feel in that old entry. So is there some kind of text crawler at work around here sniffing out certain keywords? This is serious. I hope LiveJournal is able to put a stop to this ASAP.

I don't want to disable anonymous commenting because I do have friends visiting my journal who are not on LJ. All I can do at this point is deleting that comment and marking it as spam. I wonder if there's anyway to ban certain IP addresses (I track them in comments) from commenting on my journal. Anyone?

Most people here on LJ noticed last night the "Repost to" Facebook and Twitter checkboxes magically appearing underneath the text editor whenever we post something. If you are like me, I'd like to keep my LJ personality separate from my Facebook one, thank you very much. So here comes the worry -- What if I accidentally checked that box that says 'Repost to Facebook' just before I press the Post button?

Well, this is what I found out: as long as I'm not logged in Facebook or Twitter via LJ, those checkboxes are not enabled (which of course means I'm not able to select it). Phew!

Now, for strange reasons, if you do want to cross post, you would need to log on to Facebook or Twitter via LJ first. Notice merely logging on to those accounts on the same computer is not enough. You would have to go to the account setting on LJ to connect to Facebook and/or Twitter.

To login or logout from these social network sites, go to your setting extensions to make the appropriate change.
FYI: as of this morning, if you try to connect to Facebook, you'd get a message that says Bogus form data; please go back and try again. - me think LJ must've been bombarded with angry users since last night that they scrambled to keep the situation under control.

Besides the cross post option, LJ also implemented a related service called "pingback". Now, what are pingbacks? You can refer to FAQ #293 for a description. In a nutshell, when the pingback service is turned on, it is designed to alert you when someone linked your post in their own LJ posts. At first glance, this seems to be a desirable service. After all, who wouldn't want to keep track of what other people are saying about what s/he wrote in her/his posts, eh? However, here's the catch: when you turned the service on to keep track of where your posts are linked to, you also agree to allow LJ alert other users who chose to enabled the pingback service should you link their posts in your entry or comment, even if that entry or comment is flocked or private. Scary isn't it? Especially when the alert is sent, LJ quotes ~600 word context surrounding the link in question, regardless of the privacy setting of the post.

So yes, I think the pingback service is a double edged sword. In the spirit of keeping my privacy intact, I'd rather stay ignorant of who's linking my post to where. To turn on/off the service, you can go to the privacy setting of your account to make the appropriate change.

And lastly, felisblanco mentioned that LJ has now fucked up its handling of "/" in their tags. So if you see an LJ tag that has a "/" in it, and try to get the tagged entries, it won't work any more! I wonder how long it's going to take LJ fix that. If they don't do it soon, they might have a massive exodus of users from LJ land on their hand.