I apologize for spamming everyone with this again, but the actual election is now open for the LJ Advisory Board. As many of you remember from earlier this month, I’m strongly in support of tango for this position, he’s a great leader, long-time member of LJ’s support department, and a great guy all around. To keep this announcement concise, I’ll link to a post in Tango’s LJ where he explains more about his qualifications and so forth.

What’s important in this election is making everyone’s voice heard, and electing someone who will best represent the views of the entire LJ userbase (or at least the majority of it). So, everyone, please vote in the election.

The poll is being held instant-runoff style, where everyone selects their three favourite candidates, and the two winners receive a position on the board. Obviously, I support tango, but voting for just one person in all three spots doesn’t make just sense. Personally, I also support vichan and rm, but there’s a full list of candidates and links to their position statements available in news, so you can review the candidates and choose your favourites.

Please Vote In The Election!

Hi all! Some friends of mine recently launched a new furry forum, and I think many of you would really enjoy it. It’s called Serenity Hollows, and it’s meant to be a fun, friendly, generalized furry site for everyone. It’s just getting started, so we’d love to have more people there, and all ages are welcome. So, if you’re interested in meeting more furs, or if you just like forums, come on over!

The URL is http://www.serenityhollows.net/. Hope to see you there!

Good morning everyone! Or afternoon, whatever the case may be. Please pardon my cross-posting, but this announcement needs to be made.

As many of you are aware, LJ is currently holding nominations to appoint a community member to their advisory board. There are a lot of users who are nominated for this, but one in particular stands out for me - tango. I’ve never met him outside of LJ, but he’s a really great guy, with the experience necessary to be perfect for this. He’s been an LJ volunteer for nearly two years, and has already made countless contributions to the LiveJournal software and community. For example, whenever I’ve commented on the LJ software in my journal in the past, he’s always been there with a helpful solution/suggestion. He also has many years of customer/tech support experience with various agencies, giving him the skills necessary to identify and communicate the needs/desires/concerns of the community at large to LJ’s management.

And, for us furs, there’s a bonus; he’s one of us! So let’s work together and put one of the most compentent, level-headed, and helpful furs on LJ into this position on the Advisory Board!

To show your support for Tango, all you have to do is visit this thread, and leave a comment that says “I support this nomination”. Make sure your comment says that pretty much verbatim, it sounds like they’re using an automated system to aggregate the votes. Only vote once in his thread.

If you have any questions for Tango, please direct them to this thread in his own LJ.

EDIT: We did it! Thanks everyone!

Read More And Vote In The Nomination Thread
Discuss in Tango’s LJ

I’ve seen some people giving MyFursona a lot of flack lately for being “half-finished” (I’m “softpaw” there, btw). And, admittedly, it is a work in progress. But you know what? They may still be adding features, but the parts they already have actually work. And their site is free of critical, show-stopping errors.

Tonight, I tried to register an account on a similar site, FURiends.com, mostly to keep my name from getting taken by some n00b. But, it does look quite polished (aside from the f***ing ads), so it may take off too, who knows. Right off the bat, I was unable to create an account because the verification image was broken. I gave up, and tried again later, same problem. Could it be an IE6 bug? Nope, same results in Firefox. So, I tried to load the image by itself, and received a PHP Fatal Error: Call to Undefined Function. For those who aren’t familiar with PHP, that’s a pretty freakin’ big problem.

So, I decided to pursue the matter some more, and clicked on the Support link. Oh look, they have an online helpdesk; I have one of those too, I’ll use it. Nope! “License Error: Key file has expired”. That’s not quite what I was expecting to see on a production site, since it probably means they were using a trial version that they didn’t purchase when it ran out. But, it’s a mistake every admin’s allowed to make once, so I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.

Luckily, they had a support email address too. So, I wrote up a nice email explaining the errors I encountered, and even made a friendly offer to help out if they’re short on programmers. Sent the message on its way, and figured it would make it somewhere, right? Nope! Denied again. But this wasn’t just any typical mail server error. The support address listed on their site, which looks like it’s an alternative to the helpdesk, is actually directly integrated with that system. And, since it’s broken, it rejects all incoming mail.

At this point, I’ve written them off, at least for awhile. I understand the complexities of running a site like that, but to have that many critical problems that make the site unusable is just pathetic. The FurAffinity team could do better, and that’s really saying something, because they suck pretty hard. Their choice of advertising providers really irks me as well, there were some very shady-looking domains asking to plant cookies on my computer; but that’s a whole other discussion.

If you want to join a site that actually works properly, check out MyFursona.

EDIT: Thanks to some very ironic timing, the MF crew found some pretty major exploits and have taken the site down temporarily. I stand by my statements about FURiends, though.

Well, about a half-hour ago, my LJ account reverted to its Basic status. It occurred a little faster than I expected, but I was able to get my theme the way I wanted it beforehand (thanks for the info on that, tango!), and I didn’t have to do major work to my userpics to compensate for their voodoo-ish deactivation algorithm. Only one of the ones I like didn’t get chosen, but I really like the ones that stayed, so it’s no big deal.

Also, I don’t think this is likely to be a problem, but if anyone reading this is thinking about gifting me a paid subscription, please don’t. Such gestures give me warm fuzzies most of the time, but I don’t want anyone sending LJ money on my behalf anymore than I want to spend it myself.

And, just to clarify, I’m not “leaving” LJ at this time, and I’ll continue to update as regularly as I update anything else. I only dropped my paid account.

In preparation for the end of my paid account here on LJ, I changed to a non-paid style, and just finished skinning it to match Lupinia. I’m not in love with the new layout, but it’ll do.

And, after the recent posts I made, I was reminded of the power of LJ’s community component, so I decided to stick around a little longer. I’m just not going to pay for the privilege anymore; and I think with the loyalty userpics I’ve accumulated, I shouldn’t have a problem in that arena.

Hello everyone! And welcome to the first entry posted simultaneously to my LJ and my self-hosted Wordpress journal. After tiggles posted a link to this, I made my final decision that, by the end of April, I will no longer be using LJ as my primary blog/journal.

But don’t panic!

Before my paid account runs out, I will create an RSS account for my new journal that you can add to your friend list, and I will still be reading journals here and still active in communities and such.

So, if you’re doing all that, why move at all?

On April 28, my account will revert to Basic if I don’t renew it, and I don’t intend to. I’m not giving LJ any more of my money. Once I’m no longer a paying customer, I’ll be more vulnerable to whatever policy changes SUP wants to make in the future, and I don’t trust them not to screw things up royally. My LJ has been a big part of my life since the day I graduated high school in 2003, and while I’m not usually the first to jump ship in cases like this, I don’t want to risk losing such a large amount of data that I care about greatly. So, I’m pre-emptively moving to a platform I control, that I can preserve indefinitely.

I’m still working on moving my entries to Wordpress, and I have more work to do to integrate my new journal into my website (links from the navigation bar, etc), so it’ll be a little while before I can make the full jump. I’ll keep you all informed as I work on this, and I’ll make sure it’s obvious when I cease active posting here.

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In other news, I’m thinking about setting up my WP journal to post to InsaneJournal simultaneously. I don’t have a paid account there, so I can’t create an RSS account syndicated from Lupinia like I can on here.

Oh, and while reviewing old entries, I found something very interesting. I’ve been getting spam sent to the “truck-sales” account, which goes to the catch-all address. I figured it was randomly generated, but I saw an entry way back in 2004 where I used that address to try to sell my dad’s abandoned pickup truck. As far as I know, that was the only reference to it ever made anywhere; the spam bots are nothing if not thorough

In regards to my last post, I really appreciate the feedback on my decision process. LJ’s new policies don’t really affect me directly, but they affect a very large number of LJ users. Besides, my grievance isn’t with specific policies, but with the overall change in direction they’ve taken. As I mentioned in this post, I used to really admire LJ for being one of the only successful web communities that could acheive such great things without the support of advertising sales. They could’ve easily sustained that for at least a few more years, if not longer, but the management team took the typical capitalist sucker-move and sold out.

So, despite the fact that my account is essentially the same as it was a few months ago, I harbour deep feelings of betrayal toward LJ. I don’t particularly want to be affiliated with it anymore, and after weighing all the options, it’s a very difficult decision between jumping ship now and staying for awhile to wait for everyone else to make the first jump.

After reviewing the comments to my last post, and spending more time working with Wordpress, I’m thinking about doing a sort of trial-phase, where I’m using both my self-hosted journal and my LJ (I still hate the word “blog”, despite its convenience). I’m in the process of copying the entire contents of my LJ into my WP journal (which will be beneficial to moving to another service if I choose one in the future), and I finished skinning it to match the rest of my site. I haven’t integrated it into things like my header graphics yet, since that’s a lot of work for something that may be temporary.

No matter what happens, I don’t want to lose touch with anyone, and I still intend to maintain a friends list here for as long as there are people I care about using LJ. My posts are the items in question, and whether they make it to LJ by posting them directly, or via an RSS account (ie, people can still watch my self-hosted journal via their LJ friend list). The other complication is that my paid account runs out at the end of this month, and I really don’t want to renew it.

Anyway, thanks again to everyone who posted to my last post, and to everyone who reads this

As I mentioned before, I’m very disappointed in the newest policies of LJ’s management, and their methods of addressing public reaction to those policies. Quite frankly, the whole thing reminds me of the last few years of my heavy involvement in Second Life, except this time, I only have $25/year on the line.

Thus far, I haven’t seen a replacement for LJ that I’ve wanted to really jump at, so I’ve been contemplating the prospect of hosting my own blog as part of my website. It’s not like I’m pressed for space or bandwidth.

On the other paw, I don’t know how having a more formal blog would impact my usage habits. Filtering is of particular concern to me, and while I don’t make filtered posts very often, I do make things friends-only from time to time. I don’t know how to do that with something like Wordpress.

So, if I could get some of y’all’s thoughts on the matter, I’d appreciate it.
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In regards to the recent LJ news post, I had this to say. I posted it as a comment to the post, in hopes that others might see it.
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