LiveJournal Feedback

Finding Your Friends

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 22:50:20 GMT

Coming Soon: The Find Your Friends Feature!

LiveJournal users love the way their Friends page serves as a single location for all the latest updates from the people they care about. For new users, however, it can be hard to find people to add to their Friends page because they don’t know anyone on LiveJournal yet. Often they have friends already using LiveJournal but don’t know they're here or how to find them.

We're working on a new Find Your Friends feature that will make it easier for new users to find existing friends using their web-based email contacts list. Once found, they'll be able to quickly add those journals to their Friends page or send a note telling the person about their new journal. Note that only logged-in users will be able to use this feature.

However, we know that your privacy is important to you -- not all users want to be found, even by people they already know in "the real world" (sometimes especially by people they already know in the real world). So we're working to ensure that this feature provides a variety of security settings to reflect the various ways in which someone would want or not want to be found.

The current options for sharing your email address are limited to choosing whether or not your email address is displayed publicly on your Profile page, which in turn determines whether the email address is searchable as well. On your Edit Profile page, you can currently use the "Show my email address to:" field to select from the following options:

Everyone

Registered Users Only

Friends Only

Nobody

If you select Everyone, then your journal can be found when someone searches for your email address using the Email option in the LiveJournal search box; if you select any of the other three, then your journal cannot be found through an email search.

The Find Your Friends feature will search your web-based email contacts to see if there are any matches on LiveJournal. With the new tool, we're divorcing the concepts of searchability and visibility. You will be able to have your email address searchable without actually displaying it anywhere on LiveJournal, or you can choose to display your email address without it being searchable by the Find Your Friends feature.

We're asking for your thoughts and feedback to help ensure the available settings for this feature have the level of privacy that you want.

The new setting will be "Allow others to find me by searching for my email address:" and it will have these options:

Yes -- show my username in the search results

Yes -- but don't show my username in the search results. Only show my email address and allow users to send me a notification about their new journal. I can then choose to add them as a Friend if/when I want to.

No -- don't allow my email address to be searchable.

For new users, their email address will be searchable and their username shown through this feature until they make a selection otherwise - but during the signup process (specifically, the Find Your Friends portion) the option will be presented and explained. Existing users will be presented with an opt-in page after the feature is launched so they can make the specific choice that best fits their personal preference. If no choice is made, existing users will have the option defaulted to "No."

Please comment to ask questions or suggest ways in which this feature could be improved -- we want to ensure that your privacy is protected while making this feature as useful as possible. Thank you!

feedback on profile page redesign

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 22:27:31 GMT

See this post in lj_design for details.

Community maintainers and moderators

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 13:34:49 GMT

We've been having some conversations about how to avoid a co-maintainer removing other maintainers. As part of that, we are looking to expand the rights of community moderators - so that maintainers can appoint moderators to help them with a community, instead of co-maintainers. What do you think a moderator should be able to do in a community?

View Poll: Should moderators be able to:

Also, what about a feature that would not let a maintainer remove a maintainer who had been appointed before them (like a seniority of maintainers)?

View Poll: Maintainer removal

We'd like to hear what you think - comments are welcome!

What comment below do you think best represents your position? (Click "Link" that's right after the time and date in the comment you like best, and cut and paste the URL here. You can change your response at any time by clicking on the poll number, and then clicking the [ Fill out Poll ] link at the top of the page.)

View Poll: Goat vote

TXTLJ Notifications

Thu, 22 May 2008 22:02:14 GMT

Back in December of 2006, we introduced TXTLJ, a feature which lets you interact with LiveJournal from your mobile phone. We'd like to know your thoughts on using this feature for notifications. If you haven't tried it before, here's how it works:

When you click the button (or "Track this" on some layouts), you'll get the option to get notifications for that event (comments on an entry, new post in a journal or community, or events like birthdays or new userpics uploaded by your friends) that will look like this:

If you've entered your mobile phone number here, you can choose to get those notifications on your cell phone by selecting "TXTLJ." Plus, Paid, and Permanent accounts get 3, 10, or 15 notifications free each month.

If you haven't tried this before and think this might be anything you'd be interested in using, can you please try it out and let us know what you think? You can check any and all that apply, and additional comments you have would be very welcome!

View Poll: TXTLJ notifications

Indication of Custom Friends Groups on Entries

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 20:59:54 GMT

Hi guys! One feature that many of you have wanted for a very long time is some indication when entries are posted to custom friends groups. Right now, these entries show the normal Friends-only lock icon, so neither the poster nor the viewers of the entry know that the entry is filtered (the poster can find out by editing the entry, but not by viewing it).

The team has been discussing this, and we've realized that there may be a split opinion on who should be able to see that an entry is filtered (and to which groups the entry is filtered). I'm pretty sure no one would object to the poster/journal owner seeing this information on an entry, but some people may or may not want the viewers of the entry (those who have the ability to read it) to see the information too. So, we decided we wanted to see what you guys thought about it.

If you have a very strong opinion either way, feel free to give your reasons for it in the comments. Thanks!

View Poll: Custom Friends Groups Options

Edit: Thanks for your feedback! We have implemented this feature as the majority of you wanted it (only viewable to the journal owner). You can read about it here.

We want your suggestions wishlist!

Thu, 27 Dec 2007 01:29:29 GMT

Happy Boxing Day! We are boxing up some of your most wanted features for 2008 over in the suggestions community. Please see http://community.livejournal.com/suggestions/801368.html for a poll you can take, if you have feedback about features you'd really like to see on LiveJournal in the next year.

New Customize Journal Area in Beta

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 22:09:53 GMT

In about an hour we'll be releasing the new Customize Journal area for beta testing. We've overhauled the entire UI and made it easier for you to find themes that you like and navigate through the custom options wizard. The full details of the changes will be described in lj_design.

Be sure to check out the beta version of Customize Journal and give us your feedback! Finding bugs in the navigation or within the theme categories? Does something look weird in your browser? If so, let us know! Make sure to include the browser (and version) that you're using so we can try to narrow down problems. Let us know what you think!

Important Changes to Note:

Customizations made using the wizard are now based on your theme, not the layout it's under. If you switch to a different theme in the same layout, it will have the default theme settings. If you switch back to the theme you had before, your customizations should still be there.
Previewing a theme you have customized will show those customizations, not what is in the thumbnail. The thumbnail shows only what the theme looks like, without your customizations (these images are static, not generated).
Browse themes by layout under the "All" category. This option is not available under each category because we currently can't filter themes by layout within a category. Clicking the layout name under each thumbnail will also filter to show only themes within that layout (also all themes, not within a category). This drop-down is a temporary solution. We plan to have a better way to sort by layout.
"Advanced" has been renamed to "Developer Area" and is now its own section. The link can be found following the categories, near the link to switch to S1.
Categories may contain some themes that don't belong, such as light themes in Dark. We will be going over these again before we launch.
Links List is currently a link off to the Manage Your Links List page, but it will be brought into the UI.
Cuteness Attack faces are now their own theme.

For more details about these changes, please see this post in lj_design

horizon and vertigo

Fri, 08 Jun 2007 03:32:41 GMT

Horizon's been out of beta for quite some time now, but we've made some changes (and hopefully some bugfixes), so we wanted to send it through another round of beta-testing before making the changes to Horizon itself. And Vertigo -- well, we're getting close to finally releasing it from beta. :)

So, check out the beta versions of Horizon or Vertigo and give us your feedback! Does something look weird in your browser? If so, let us know! Make sure to include the browser (and version) that you're using so we can try to narrow down problems. Let us know what you think!

homepage

Thu, 17 May 2007 21:21:08 GMT

We'd love to hear your feedback about the new homepage! Fill out the poll, then comment with any thoughts you've got :)

View Poll: #986720

Redesign of My LJ and Homepage

Fri, 09 Feb 2007 21:03:14 GMT

We've received some feedback that My LJ isn't that useful. We'd like to move some of the modules over (possibly with additional features) into a redesigned logged-in homepage. The current logged-in homepage only includes quicklinks. We'd like to bring over the features that you do like and create a landing page that is useful to you. We’d love to get your feedback on what works and doesn't work for you, and what you'd like to see happen to My LJ and the homepage in the future.

View Poll: Homepage and My LJ Integration

Horizon & Vertigo: Have you voted yet?

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 05:29:09 GMT

We’ve started working on the vertical version of the new site scheme. Vertigo is the sibling to Horizon, and its look and feel and functionality is a cross between Horizon and Dystopia. We’re also evaluating Horizon during this time to see if changes can be made to its style and organization. Take a look at the below lj_design posts and give us some feedback.

I’ve closed off comments here, so we can keep the feedback in one place. Feel free to comment over in lj_design with why you voted for what you voted for. We’d love to hear any feedback that is relevant to the layout and functionality of both Horizon and Vertigo.

Thanks!

Vertigo Has Landed: http://community.livejournal.com/lj_design/10754.html

Horizon Feedback: http://community.livejournal.com/lj_design/11039.html

Site Scheme Organization: http://community.livejournal.com/lj_design/11336.html

new themes

Sat, 13 Jan 2007 00:58:19 GMT

We've read over your comments to the previous post and pulled together a bunch of them for another round of voting. We didn't include any suggestions that are already available on Vox (since we'll be adding those anyway) or if the suggested theme resembles one of the existing themes. We'll be making about 10-20 themes based on the top winners in this poll. So, feel free to check off your five favorites. Honor system. ;)

View Poll: #905719

Themes for the New Year

Thu, 04 Jan 2007 22:23:53 GMT

We’d love to hear your suggestions for new themes in the Mixit layout. Mixit is our grab-bag layout which currently includes themes from Piximix and our designers. Once we’ve gathered enough goodies, we’ll run a poll so you can vote on your favorites. Suggestions can be broad such as 'modern' or 'dark' themes, or they can be specific things such as 'horses' or 'trees'.

Leave suggestions below in comments. Thanks!

more Q&A

Thu, 02 Nov 2006 07:07:29 GMT

We've all, uh, kind of been busy lately. But we haven't forgotten! I have a small round of stuff this time, and hopefully more will be coming soon. (If your question hasn't been answered yet -- don't worry, we've still got a list of everyone's questions.)

prettygolucky: Are you guys going to eventually include a messaging system on LJ, or would you at least consider it? I.M.'s, that is (kind like the MySpace system, but better since LJ is better than MySpace anyway).

-- Yes, we are! We've finally launched LJ Talk, which is basically an IM system that's integrated with LiveJournal directly. It uses the Jabber framework, so we're able to communicate with people from different services as well (for example, you can talk to someone on Google Talk). Check it out -- I've been using it for a few months now, and I find it really convenient to use.

eloisem: Are you planning on implementing any web 2.0 features into LJ, for instance a box that pops up when you hover over a username to quickly navigate to their profile, add them as a friend, etc. (Kind of like how it is on Vox?)

-- In the time since you asked this question, we did! We implemented the "contextual hover menus", that appear whenever you hover over the icon in someone's username (like frank). (If you don't like these menus, you can turn 'em off at the Viewing Options page.)

gethenix: Anyway to have a feature where we can see who on our flist is currently online?

-- Kind of. If someone's logged into LJ Talk, you can see that they're online with either the contextual hover menus, or by looking at their profile, right under the "LJ Talk" listing.

japantherine -- Who was the first person to sign up for a journal that wasn't part of the makers/maintinace?

-- One of bradfitz's friends! Brad originally created the site to keep in touch with his friends, so the first several dozen users were Brad's friends.

desdema -- Is it really that hard to add a delete button to the "Edit Memorable Entry" pages? (Yes, I know how to delete a comment with the current setup.)

-- Heh, good suggestion! I'll add it to my list of things to try to do when I get some free time to dig into the code for that. (The ever-fantastic coffeechica wants me to point out that if you're not as memories-savvy as desdema is, you can find information on deleting memories in our FAQ.)

ihearttoronto -- In the future, is it possible to add a mood theme and music section to the comments area? (i hope you understand that)

-- It's certainly possible, but I don't think it's something we'll be doing. In general, comments aren't as "feature-rich" as entries are -- you don't have the full range of options and whatnot with comments as you do with entries -- so we avoid adding extra fields to comments. If you want to mention your mood/music, you can just say so in the comment itself. ;)

kremmen -- There are options for placeholders for big pictures and video. Why isn't there be one to insert automatic cuts in long posts? To cut all posts on one's friends page to an arbitrary max length would be an even more useful option than either of those.

-- We offer the placeholder options for people who are browsing over a slow connection, browing from a public place (or work), or for people who just plain don't want to have Flash video appearing on their Friends pages. So it's more a concern for loading time than anything else; browsers can generally handle text perfectly fine. So we've never actually seen a pressing need for a "automatically cut any post longer than X characters option".

But, I will say that it'd likely be one heck of a feature to code up. janinedog was working on something somewhat related a few months ago, and after squinting at the code for a while, and asking around for other opinions or insights, we could never get it to work quite right. (Auto-cuts cause serious problems if the cut lands somewhere in the middle of some HTML, like a table or an image or something.) And ultimately, the demand for this sort of thing isn't worth spending the time it'd take to get it right.

stillimage -- Why does the Frank radio not work? Do you ask before you stream the voice posts?

-- FRNK Radio only works when there are voiceposts queued up to play. If there haven't been any public voiceposts in a certain amount of time (I'm not sure how long), then you won't hear anything when you try to "tune in", unfortunately. We don't ask permission from each individual before including their voiceposts here, but we only include public voiceposts -- anything that's protected at the time that it's posted won't be included.

aileron -- Are there plans of implementing cross-posting features between LJ and vox?

We don't currently have plans for being able to import from one to another (they're both Six Apart services, but they don't share a common database backend, so we'd have to build an import system from scratch), but it might be possible in the future. More likely, there may be a way to cross-post an entry to both Vox and LJ at the same time, but I don't think there are any plans to do that, at least not in the near future.

My first round of Q&A

Fri, 20 Oct 2006 23:48:28 GMT

Oh, be gentle with me! ;) Hope you find these useful.

flying_squirrel -- Are there any plans to integrate Vox and LJ? Will I be able to add Vox users as friends, for example?
-- While there are no plans to integrate Vox and LJ - because they are two separate services and will remain so - there might be federation between the two for features such as OpenID, friending, posting, etc.

stardustxsiren -- Are we to ever expect full integration with any other SixApart services, or will LJ always stay separate? (I got a Vox account, and it's nice, but I enjoy LJ's community-feel too much to switch.)
-- An expansion of the above - we have no plans for merging or combining LJ with any other Six Apart services. While each site is a similar hybrid of social networking and communication features, each also targets slightly different audiences (and I’m not just referring to age - this includes the reason why they're blogging, their experience with technology in general, their experience with blogging, etc ) with specific functionality tailored for that group. People on one site generally do not use another site for the same reasons.

It would be very difficult for us to combine any of our services seamlessly, unless we wanted to ignore the fact that the user bases are diverse and have different expectations out of the service they're using. If you enjoy LJ’s community-feel, then stay with LJ and support the growth of the community. That’s the kind of thing that we love to hear. :)

hinotori -- No offence, but -- why do you keep adding myspace-y new stuff before the old, good things work on everything (e.g. quick replies still don't work with some styles, etc...)? Recently, with every change I find myself thinking "...I liked LJ the way it was."
-- We’re definitely not trying to make the same features as other sites. Sometimes there will be overlap between the features we provide, sure, but that's just because there's an overlap in terms of some of the services we provide.

We really are doing the best that we can with our given resources. A portion of our time is spent developing features, and the rest is spent on the maintenance of current functionality. We do keep a running list of all the bugs that are reported to us, and we generally tackle them in order of priority. The things affecting a whole bunch of users will get more attention than something that only one user is experiencing. Maybe we'll start switching it up and fix the oldest tickets first. Either way, know that we are aware and trying to get to these issues as quickly as we can, but we're limited by the number of hours in a day.

cloverkill -- What is the most popular community on LJ, and who is the most popular user? You should post and update those stats regularly!
-- That’s an interesting suggestion and one that we have listed in our ‘could do...but do we want to do that?’ list. In general, we try to stay away from the popularity contests that frequent other sites. On LJ it’s really about the content that you are sharing, and less about how many friends you have.

While we don't have popularity contests here, we do make an effort to showcase all the cool ways in which users are using LiveJournal in our LJ Spotlight community.

brentdax -- Why did you create the new Horizon theme? Was there something deficient about XColibur?
-- We created the new site scheme for a number of reasons. The thinking behind it is laid out in this lj_design post. In short, the main drivers of the design were around usability and scalability. We wanted a site scheme that would be easy for new users to navigate, increase visibility to frequent tasks, offer a scalable model for adding new features, and fix issues with the submenus and positioning of various links.

change4adollar -- Why does horizon not have a place in the drop down menu for faq?
-- We felt it was redundant to have a link in the drop-down menu, when FAQ search is now integrated throughout the site (select from the search drop-down box).

thewhiteowl -- What happened to all the links on the manage page in horizon?
-- The idea was for the Manage page to be strictly about account information. We wanted to phase out the idea of using that page as a secondary sitemap because that was just redundant. We worked in most of the links on the Manage page into the menus of Horizon, but if they're not there, then they're listed on the full sitemap.

notasmith -- Does LJ plan on introducing new mood themes for the new journal themes? I’ve tried setting one up on my own but it never seems to work.
-- Do you mean mood themes that use the same design as the new journal themes? Or just new mood themes in general? The former is an interesting idea and the latter is something that we’ll eventually get to. If you’re having issues with creating custom mood theme and you think it’s a bug, submit an issue to the Support team and we’ll look into it.

ktcaop -- Is there a way to seriously make the FAQ a little less cluttered and make it a little more organized?
-- We've actually been meaning to spend time on making the FAQ system easier to use - some people on the team have been wanting this for years! However, it is a pretty big and complex change for us to make. We're still planning on fixing it as we look at usability of various portions of the site. We have some ideas of our own about this, but we'd love to hear your thoughts about what you'd like to change about it, too.

myilow -- What features are you planning to release for paid users (vs free) in the near future, and approximately when? Is there a way to stay updated on features? Is there a way to guide future development as a user (i.e. make suggestions and get acknowledgement)
-- Whatever happened to surprises and looking forward to the unexpected?! ;)

While we’d love to be more open about what’s coming next, we don't want to make promises that could possibly change due to resources, planning, or some other unforseen disaster. However, we do post to news regularly about features and enhancements. With all new features, we try to ensure that each account level receives appropriate value. Paid users definitely get all the premium benefits of anything new that we release. Basic and Plus get some combination of benefits, enough for them to use the features but without any bells and whistles.

Yes, you can definitely submit suggestions to us. If it’s a good idea and works with the site as a whole, you may just see it become implemented. The suggestions community has a list of most of the feature requests we've gotten. We really recommend you look through the tags first before making a suggestion, just to save your time. We're also working on getting together a "Frequently Suggested" list, to make it easier on everyone.

brenden -- Why is there still a yellow star at the top of my page linking me to payments if I am a permanent account holder? :)
-- You have that because you are a *super star* to us. Really, minus the cheesy factor! All of our paid and permanent account holders have stars; the other account levels have yellow arrows. It’s our ‘upgrade, you know you wanna’ arrow. :)

wee_little_me -- What is your ultimate goal for LiveJournal? How do you know when you've achieved this? (my apologies if this has already been answered on other areas of the site)
-- This was answered here: "We want to stay focused on doing what we do best; we don't want to lose sight of why LiveJournal is cool and different to begin with. Our ultimate goal is to provide a stable, easy-to-use, online journaling community that you can be proud to use. Really, our goals aren't that different than any other business: make a quality product, keep people satisfied, fix things that suck."

I combined these, but they are of equal value to us :D :
cellio -- what features are your top priorities for, say, the next year?
peachtess -- What are some neat features that are in the works that we should be looking forward to?
kingfox -- So, with all the work that's being done on Vox and Voxish things showing up on LJ, what's the roadmap for LJ looking like these days?
-- In regards to Voxish things showing up on LJ, that’s to be expected of any company with several different product teams working under the same roof. We try to communicate knowledge between the teams so that we can share features and innovations instead of replicating work.

Again we’d love to share more with you about what’s coming next, but we like leave some features as surprises. Plus it would suck for us to promise features, and then take it away or not be able to deliver it in the same way as promised. The only claims that we can make on our future goals and priorities is what’s stated above. We want to stay focused on what we do best and keep LiveJournal cool, unique, easy-to-use, and a place for your journal’s home on the web.

More Q & A

Fri, 29 Sep 2006 05:18:21 GMT

Here's a few more:

luckycyberbunny -- Say I do a project for school or something, and I get a bunch of people signed up for LJ... do I get an honor or something?

We don't have anything official in place for something like this, but we have discussed something similar to it in the past. To my knowledge, it's not something currently in the works, but that doesn't mean it'll never happen either. With the way LiveJournal's account types are setup, chanced are something like this would have to be restricted to referring new people who end up with paid account, otherwise it could be abused by people fairly easily.

paperstar -- Why don't you allow users to change usernames for free up to a certain number of times?

Username changes are something we want to discourage people from doing lightly, which has always been the reason for there being a cost to renaming. It can cause a lot of confusion among someone's friends, and is generally something we only want people to do if they just can't stand that username they picked years ago, but dont want to lose all of their entries by creating a new journal with the username they want.

adudeabides -- Could I buy LJ/6A (assuming I had the cash)?

Probably not, but I'm sure every website has it's price. ;)

sunkistsoda -- how about making an easier suggestion system?

I don't think the suggestions system itself is currently difficult, the thing that makes it hard in some cases is the sheer number of suggestions that already exist. I'm not really sure there's any other system that would make this any easier to handle, but if you have any ideas on how to improve it, feel free to suggest them!

starletfallen -- Have you ever considered giving Frank the Goat a cohort? Like... an evil bunny of doom or something?

But Frank is so incredibly awesome as is, what cohort could possibly do anything other than diminish his greatness?

darkenedminds -- I hate that users can add my 99% friendsonly LJ to their friends list without my consent - particularly troll journals. is there any feature in the works to make friending between users a consentual thing? Make a friends request, then accept/decline?

When someone adds you to their friends page, it doesn't give them access to your friends only entries. It just means any entries you post that you've given them access to read will show up on their friends page, which is what they could see just by looking at your journal. I think the problem with this is the simple fact that everything's referred to as "friends", which brings on the next 3 questions:

efbq -- When will I be able to rename 'friends' and 'friend of' on my info page?

kineticfactory -- What happened to the proposal to split the "friend" relation into separate trust/subscription relations?

natalief -- Why on *earth* is it called a Friends list?

The origin of the whole friends page/friends list came from way back when the site was created with the intent of friends being able to keep in touch with each other. There weren't any other sites like this out there yet, and a lot of the problems that are now around nobody really anticipated then. At the time, nobody thought that just because I want to read someone's journal doesn't mean I want them reading mine.

We've discussed splitting up friends relations in the past, and it's still something we'd like to do at some point, but we just haven't had the time to squeeze it in. For the people who haven't followed this in the past, the issue is that adding someone to your friends list currently does 2 things: It allows you to view that person's entries on your friends page (the entries they've given you access to view, that is), and it allows them access to any entries you've posted using the 'Friends Only' security level.

The idea here was to split it up so that you could subscribe to someone's journal without having to let them view your friends only entries, or grant them access to view your Friends Only entries without having theirs show up on your friends page. Technically, you can do all of this already if you use custom filters and edit the "Default View" filter, or use the notification system but that seems like too much work for fairly basic functionality, and we'd like to eventually change it. It's one of those things I can't say we have any sort of ETA on, but it's definitely something we're still planning on doing.

As to actually having the ability to rename 'friends' and 'friend of' (or whatever they might be changed to in the future), it's probably unlikely that users would be given the ability to edit the actual names of these fields. If this were possible, it woudln't be long before people started changing 'friends' to things along the line of 'idiots' and start adding people they dont like or just as many random people as they can find. We'll likely pick standard wording for these, but we'll make sure to pick a term that's less loaded than "Friends" is!

q&a

Thu, 28 Sep 2006 15:32:45 GMT

My turn, my turn!

starwatcher307 asks, "Why can you not make new features, such as the nav bar and site-scheme change, 'opt-in' instead of making them default?"

Not everybody reads news. If we made everything opt-in, nobody would opt-in because they wouldn't know it existed. What's the point of contracting developers to code a feature if nobody ever turns it on because they don't know about it?

I know what you're thinking because it was an easy set-up. If nobody opts in, doesn't that mean the feature sucks and shouldn't have been added in the first place? Not necessarily. I know you see News posts with people railing about how they're turning off our new horrid features, but I can guarantee from being able to see both internal usage statistics and all the feedback we receive that this isn't indicative of the way everyone on the site feels.

We test features and designs extensively before they go live, and we always have a discussion about the potential ramifications of turning on any feature for all users. We don't want your first experience with a new feature to be a bad one, so we try to figure out what the potential objections would be first before everyone can see it. If there's something we have to fix to address any serious concerns, we try to fix it first.

Unless there's a very good reason for us not to, we try to offer you the opportunity to "turn off" almost anything that might disrupt your experience on the site. But we have to make compromises between people who don't want anything new and the far larger group of people who just aren't paying attention but usually end up liking the changes anyway, and making things default but with an opt-out is our compromise so that both sides can find satisfaction. (I take almost sadistic glee in punching the buttons to disable each new "Did You Know" tip when I start a new journal, or when new ones come out. I even make a little "BOOM" sound as I punch each button. It's therapeutic.)

I know this comes off as us forcing things on you, and I know in our past there's loads of examples of the above process not being followed, but this is our stance on it lately and this is what we'll likely be doing in the future. Really, we're unique in that we even offer opt-outs and fallbacks; our users have come to expect a certain leniency with our featureset that would be unreasonable on most other sites of this size. We want to keep changes as non-invasive as possible out of respect for your personal space, but I'm afraid we can't guarantee that LiveJournal's future changes will never ever affect you, because unfortunately that isn't possible for a site with this many users.

worldserpent asks, "Are there any requested features that LJ has decided just not to try to create, either because they are technically impossible or are judged otherwise disruptive? If so, what are they, so we can stop wasting our time requesting them?"

Yes, this happens all the time.

We hate having to say no when we see that a feature idea has a number of supporters, but sometimes, seeing the site as a whole, we have to make decisions that a group of people will disagree with. The suggestions community has a list of most of the feature requests we've gotten. We really recommend you look through the tags first before making a suggestion, just to save your time. If you really want to see a long list (limited to 100 thanks to limitations on the tags feature), here's all requests tagged as rejected. But we're also working on getting together a "Frequently Suggested" list, to make it easier on everyone.

Any entry in Suggestions that's tagged with "rejected" probably isn't going to happen, at least not in the foreseeable future. The comments to the entry will generally give you an idea of why something is rejected, but if you have questions, the maintainer will explain if you contact her. suggestions at livejournal.com is the best address.

hrasmus asks, "I made a suggestion which was refused with the reason: 'This has already been suggested'. Is the suggestion still pending elsewhere or completely refused? And if refused, please provide a better reason than 'already suggested'."

If your suggestion has already been requested, there's probably an entry in Suggestions that explains the status of this idea. I don't have access to the Suggestions queue so I can't speak to the exact idea you're talking about, but if you need a further explanation about the status of any suggestion, please contact the maintainer (again, suggestions at livejournal.com is the best address) or email feedback at livejournal.com.

jiggery_pokery asks "When suggestions are made to suggestions and tagged with 'This suggestion has at this time been rejected by site employees. It will be reconsidered at a later date.', when will this later date be? If you don't know at this time, can you state that you do not expect to reconsider them in the next 3/6/12 months?

It depends on the reason why it got rejected. Some things will never be implemented: for example, things that are technically impossible, or things that would take more developer energy than the feature's worth to the whole site. But things that get suggested a lot might come back to our attention in 6 months, and if situations have changed at that time, we'll start discussion up again internally about it.

We don't have a formal review process to re-read the entire community every year, if that's what you're asking. There's currently fifteen hundred entries in there; it'd take forever to do it that way. Are there buried jewels in there? Definitely. The suggestions maintainer frequently lets us know about suggestions that have gone stale but might be implementable now, and of course the community lets us know through Support and other feedback too.

lab_brat asks, "With a lot of the features that were for paid users only now being available to plus accounts, is there anything coming up that will make a paid account more attractive?"

waitnforheavn asks, "When are you going to give people with free accounts more options?"

uniquewonders asks, "Will paid/perm users get benefits that plus users won't have at all or is the 'scale' system the one that is always going to be used from now on?"

When releasing new features, it's always a delicate balance for us. We want to make our newest features available to everyone if they want it (when it's technically feasible), because we like to see everybody having fun with the new toys. But we do want to preserve the value of the Paid/Permanent accounts. Also, some of the Paid features are a bit of a drag on system resources, so in these cases it becomes necessary to limit it somehow so that the site performance remains high for everyone.

This is why, recently, we've gone to offering our features in "tiers" (Free gets a little, Plus gets a little more, Paid/Perm get everything). These allow almost everyone to check out the new features, but still provides some incentive to upgrade later if someone wants more of a feature. We certainly understand, though, that this isn't the best option for every new thing we do, and it is likely that in the future there will be features released only to users who have Paid or Permanent accounts.

kimnrowdy asks, "What are the ultimate goals for LiveJournal? MySpace seems to have taken over the world, but they have also become the internet whipping boy as well as a horrible cliché. What would a positive idealist future for LiveJournal be and why? Thanks :)"

We want to stay focused on doing what we do best; we don't want to lose sight of why LiveJournal is cool and different to begin with. Our ultimate goal is to provide a stable, easy-to-use, online journaling community that you can be proud to use. Really, our goals really aren't that different than any other business: make a quality product, keep people satisfied, fix things that suck.

And searchability. We want that too. But that's a topic for another feedback entry. ;-)

Questions and answers: part something.

Wed, 27 Sep 2006 18:58:13 GMT

So I thought I'd go ahead and take a stab at some of the questions everyone submitted. I think I'm as interested in reading what people have questions about as all of you are about seeing them answered. ;)

boyspacefriend -- why doesn't livejournal allow us to post our own ads on our blogs

LiveJournal itself only allows people with certain account types to see ads, and in the cases where someone does see ads, there's a limited amount. Allowing users to advertise in their own journals would not only cause people who shouldn't be seeing ads on LiveJournal to see them, but could also result in other users being exposed to far more advertisements on a page than intended.

jiggery_pokery -- Are there any plans to change the Terms of Service by which we abide in the coming year? If not, can you give a commitment that they will not change?

We don't have any plans to change the Terms of Service right now, but we can never guarantee that it won't be necessary to change them. As new laws get passed, and existing laws have grey areas clarified from new precedents being set, there's always the potential that the Terms of Service will need to be changed.

jiggery_pokery -- Is the privacy policy considered stable? Are there plans to reflect the fact that not all LiveJournal users live in the USA and so local (or continental) privacy jurisdictions may apply for some users in addition to US regulations?

The privacy policy is considered stable. As for international users, section VII in the Terms of Service does note that users are required to abide by the laws of the local jurisdiction they are in. LiveJournal itself falls under the law of the United States, specifically in the state of California. We don't enforce rules set outside of the U.S. since they don't apply to LiveJournal itself; it's the user's responsibility to comply with the laws of the country they are in. There are currently no plans to change this.

miss_mary_b -- Can LJ workers read friends only entries?

Some employees do have the ability to view non-public entries. This is restricted to people whose job it is relevant for, and is used in cases where severe violations of the Terms of Service have been reported. I'd imagine that all websites that allow users to post restricted content have this ability, since it could result in some nasty lawsuits if you were to receive a report of something like a copyright violation and not be able to verify it and act on it.

serpentclara -- How do you feel about users posting fanfiction (i.e. material that violates copyright, technically) in their journal?

We're fine with people posting fanfiction, and in most cases, it doesn't actually violate anyone's copyright. In the cases where it does, the copyright holder can file an official notice to have the content removed.

Questions! Answers! Dancing robots! Okay, not the robots.

Tue, 26 Sep 2006 23:22:52 GMT

And my turn!

* coffeecaptain asked, "Any chance we could see the financial statements?"

Well, sure, but then I'd have to kill you to prevent top-secret information from leaking.

Seriously, though: we're a privately-held company, so we don't have to share our financial statements with the public. Sure, we could, but that'd be like hanging up a sign for our competitors saying "free eats!" We'd love to be able to be more open with you guys -- in a general way, even without giving specifics -- but it would seriously hurt us to do so, because our competitors are always watching, and they go to a lot of trouble to figure out what they can about what we're up to. I like to think that we're one of the most transparent companies out there, still -- we work our little tushes off to tell you guys as much as we can about what we're doing and why we're doing it.

Shameless plug here: friend lj_biz, where I'm doing a series of posts about the reasoning behind a lot of our decisions! Many of the questions everyone asked will be covered in more depth in posts I've planned for the next few months. It's like you guys read my mind.

* igz00 asked, "How many users does LJ have? Any way of listing active users (posts within the last 6 months or something)?"

We actually do make some of our statistics public! (At least, as much as we can without giving too much away.) You can see the stats page, which updates every night.

* 7rin asked, "Do you keep track of all the "let's sue LiveJournal" suggestions?"

Any online provider gets threats of lawsuits all the time. Some of them are serious, and some of them are people who think that waving around their internet lawyer will get them whatever they want. We handle them all based on what the law, our Terms of Service, and our policies say, and we're very careful. I can't say much more without giving our lawyers hives. :)

* clare_dragonfly asked, "Are the options for gender selection ever going to broaden?"

Oh, this is a can of worms, and every time we talk about it, we wind up accidentally offending someone -- so please take this answer in the spirit it's offered, and I apologize if I accidentally give offense.

I've heard a bunch of very good reasons for expanding the selection of "gender" options on the drop-down selection. "Gender" and "sex" are two entirely different things, and I know that many transgendered and intersexed LJ users wish that there were a better way of representing their self-identity.

There are a few reasons why we haven't made this change. First, we don't actually display that field anywhere -- it's not visible on your profile or anywhere in your journal, only in aggregate form on the statistics page, and we only ask for it because a lot of people -- reporters, potential business partners, etc -- like to know the very rough breakdown of our userbase. (It's also useful for social researchers, etc.) Second, whenever we start talking about expanding the options, we quickly run into the problem of: which other options do we offer? No matter what we do, we'll accidentally leave out or offend someone. Third, we do offer an "unspecified" option, which we think is slightly better than just the usual female/male binary reduction, and there's plenty of room in your userinfo and interests -- which are visible -- to fully explain.

I'm not ruling out the possibility of ever broadening the selection -- it's always possible. But we've never really found a solution that will satisfy everyone, and so we sort of stick to the status quo until we can find a more satisfying solution -- because we think that our current options are, while certainly not perfect, better than making a change that will offend or confuse more people. We know that a percentage of our userbase doesn't fit into the binary gender construct, and we think that's just another awesome sign of the diversity on LJ. We don't want to force anyone into making an uncomfortable choice or self-identifying in a way that they don't feel fits them, which is why we'll always at the very least offer the "unspecified" option.

If we do make any changes -- and I'm certainly not promising anything! -- we'd probably offer a simple "other" option, rather than getting into all the many variations available. And it's certainly possible we'll do that in the future -- we've been talking about it in conjunction with some of our future improvements. But for right now, we think that offering "unspecified" and the option to clarify in interests or userinfo is a reasonable compromise for the time being.

* norah asked, "Can I get a guesstimate of how much of your population is primarily here because they're involved in media fandom? I know you don't poll on things like that, but just, the view from the top, as it were."

Honestly, I wouldn't even know where to start guessing -- and I'm involved in LJ fandom myself! There's a huge problem with "how do you define fandom and who's involved in it". We have a lot of really fascinating, thriving subcultures on LJ, fandom included, and I'm a sociologist at heart -- I love poking into them, seeing how they work, how they've adapted LJ's tools to their needs, etc. We're actually starting some intensive internal research into those subcultures, to see what we can do to help improve their experiences! (Without negatively affecting the site for others, of course, which is always a careful balancing act.) So the answer is -- I don't really know percentages or numbers, but there are a lot of groups (like fandoms) drawn to LJ for the things we offer, and we love seeing what they do and how they do it.

* saffirebleu asked, "Why so many changes after Six Apart said there would be no changes?"

Let's be accurate here -- Six Apart didn't promise no changes at all. That would have been silly, because a website or a community that doesn't change and grow will stagnate and die horribly. (We don't want that. I don't think you guys do either.) What Mena said when we first announced the acquisition was that Six Apart wouldn't make changes just for the sake of change -- the old "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" idea.

Problem is, a lot of people didn't realize just how badly some things on LJ were broken. We (as in the group of people who worked for Danga before the acquisition) always knew that there were rough edges and bad spots, but we never had the resources to fix them. There were other features we always wanted to add (our notifications system being a prime example) but we never had the resources to program them. We had plenty of technical/hardware infrastructure, but Six Apart gave us a lot of the business infrastructure we were lacking to make all of that easy -- they let us hire people who specialized in the 'business' stuff, so our engineers could get back to engineering, as well as hiring more engineers to share around the workload.

As a side note, and because this is as good a place as any to say it: I'm personally really bummed out by all the people who think Six Apart is the devil incarnate, or all the people who keep talking as though there's an "us" and a "them". Sure, there's "people who were here before Six Apart" and "people who came on after", but I can promise you there's no secret cabal of people in a shadowy back room steering LJ in the direction "they" want it to go. Out of all the places I've worked, Six Apart is the best for fostering team discussion and input on decisions and direction, and everyone -- whether they used to work for Danga or came on afterward -- loves LJ and all its little quirky habits.

The decisions we make -- and I'm deliberately not saying "Six Apart" there, because come on, guys, it's been twenty months, and 'they' is 'us' by now -- are motivated by wanting LJ to be a viable service one year from now, five years from now, ten years from now. Change is part of that, whether it be new features, fixing old features, or just improving the navigation and workflow of the site so people don't get so completely lost when they visit us. I know some of our decisions look weird from the outside, but there's a reason for all of them, and when we screw up, we fix it as fast as we can.

Personally, I've been here four years now, and I still think Six Apart is one of the best things to happen to LJ. It hasn't been a totally smooth ride, but nothing ever is, and we've been able to do some really cool things that we wouldn't have otherwise had the resources to do. And come on, let's not pretend that we of the old Danga days never got things spectacularly wrong, either. I can name quite a few examples. :)

somefan asked, "Has the rise of Myspace hurt LiveJournal at all?"

Only in that every time we announce a change, people in News comments invariably complain that we're turning into MySpace ;)

Seriously, though -- we're not MySpace. They're very good at what they do, but what they do and what we do aren't the same thing at all. MySpace is a social networking site, and LJ is a journaling site with some social networking features. Social networking isn't our primary goal, just like journaling isn't theirs. So really, it's like comparing apples and oranges -- people want to compare LJ and MySpace because people want to compare everything that looks even vaguely online-communityish with MySpace these days. The sites are totally different, with different goals and different ideals, and there's absolutely room for both approaches on these crazy internets of ours.

rebellibrarian asked, "Recently I saw that you don't consider LJ to be a social networking site - have you considered adding more features to make it more social networking friendly since so many people are using it that way?"

And building on my last answer, while we aren't primarily a social networking site, there's absolutely no doubt in anyone's mind that we do use social networking elements to enhance the journaling experience, whether those features are to enable people to find existing real-life friends or to make new ones. Just because social networking isn't our primary goal doesn't mean we reject it entirely! (Although, honestly, I've always been tempted to say that half of what "Web 2.0" calls 'social networking' is actually just good old-fashioned human nosiness, but that's just me.)

We've had things like communities and interest search for a really long time, and over time we've added more, like our Schools directory. Social networking isn't our primary goal, but we are very interested in where it overlaps with journaling, and we've got lots of ideas about how we can make it easier and more painless to talk to your existing friends, make new ones, and find people you already know who might be on LJ -- for instance, finally improving our search features, which one of my coworkers is going to address in his Q&A answers. But our interest lies in helping you find people who write the kind of thing you like to read, not facilitating random hookups. Much. :)

* boji asked, "With communities (especially those relating to fandoms) fragmenting into niches, is there any hope for a ticky-box that would enable posting the same post to multiple communities at one time?"

and

jerem_morrow asked, "Any chance of embedding music on our pages?"

I'm not the person who plans our development efforts, but I think I can safely say on both of these that we don't have any plans for either right now.

The reason we haven't added cross-posting is because -- well, it's really annoying to see the same post over and over and over again on your friends page. And sure, we could come up with some Usenet-style of cross-posting, where you only see an entry on your friends page once no matter how many communities it was cross-posted to, but that's development time that we could be putting somewhere else, and there's never been enough of a demand.

And as for music auto-playing when you load a page: as some wise man once said, "if I wanted your website to make noise, I'd lick my finger and rub it across the screen". Which is pretty much how we all feel about it. If you've got a paid account, you can create a custom style to add in background music, but I don't see us ever offering it as an 'official' option.

esoterikrootz asked, "When will LJ provide non-US phone post numbers for paid members & why the delay?"

Ugh, we know it's been forever since we said we wanted to add more voice post numbers, but we're really seriously limited by what our partner can provide, and they don't have international numbers. And as we mention every time this comes up, if there's anyone out there from a non-US telecom company who wants to work with us, give us a shout :)

You can use Gizmo Project to make a voice post, though. Just call the user "ljvoicepost". It's not ideal, but it is something. I think there are third-party forwarding services set up, but I don't know anything about them, what they cost, etc, etc.

questions and answers, continued

Tue, 26 Sep 2006 01:03:47 GMT

Hello, everybody. I thought I'd take a moment to answer some more development related questions as well as some other random things. I hope you have as much fun reading these as I did writing them. :-)

archangelbeth: Why is there no shttp page for logging in?

It's not really necessary, actually. The login page protects your password before submitting it to the site. Your password never gets sent in plain text, it's always obscured. (For the curious, we use an MD5 hash of the password.)

However, we do provide HTTPS functionality for login -- it's just not linked anywhere. You can go directly to it though. Bookmark it!

pink_adidas: Why did the link to find a random LJ user go away?

The random user system was horribly outdated and only showed users that were years old. Until it's been updated, I don't imagine it'll be linked from the front page again. (However, you can always use My LJ's random user feature.)

ctakahara: Will LiveJournal ever implement an XML-RPC protocol besides its own and the aging Blogger protocol?

We support the Atom API which is where most sites are (hopefully) moving. I can't say I've seen any hard plans in either direction, but it's pretty safe to say that we would not consider implementing yet another protocol. (Although patches to fix/update our support of existing protocols will always be welcome.)

greatevil: What kind of testing do you do for new features to gain assurances that it will scale correctly when used by the full LJ comunity?

Scaling features is a mix of art and science. We do not have a staging area that can simulate the load of the entire userbase, but we've developed methods to ensure new features get rolled out successfully.

First, just about every new feature has a kill switch. System administrators and select senior engineers have access to the machines that run the site and are able to immediately turn off parts of the site. For example, the entire ESN system can be shut off at the flick of the switch. Same with tags.

Second, new features tend to go through tiered releases if we expect them to add new unknown load to the system. First to staff, then to permanent members, paid, early adopters, plus, and finally all of the basic users. This helps us identify problems of scale before they become too big of a problem.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, code review! Big features go through several sets of eyes. All of our engineers are very good at what they do, but everybody misses something from time to time. By ensuring that senior engineers review anything questionable (and most things not) before they go live, we help to cut off any problems before they manifest themselves on the site.

maguspsu: Do you guys plan on ever developing your own LiveJournal client? Maybe something available to pay members?

No plans that I know of. We're always happy to link to new and interesting clients on the downloads page, though.

rog: What happened to the lj development community? No bugtracker, no patch submission process, I want to help, but can't!

The fact of the matter is that since the acquisition there hasn't been a priority on spending developer time maintaining the community and working with volunteers. All of the engineers have their time booked pretty solid working on in-house projects, leaving very little time for such tasks.

If you're interested in submitting patches, your best bet is to use lj_dev any questions. We try to help as much as possible, so between us and the technically minded users in the community, you should be able to get started helping. The bug tracker is still available, too, but we don't link it from such high volume areas.

goodnightlady: When will there be an opt-out option for the track it function on my journal?

There are no plans for an opt-out of ESN for your content. Anything that ESN allows you to do can already be done by someone sitting and hitting refresh over and over. With ESN they don't have to wear out the refresh button -- that means we reduce load on the servers which is always a good thing!

herminia: With paid accounts (+ extra userpics), it would be really nice if you could exchange extra storage space for more userpics. Would that be possible? And do you guys eat dinner with your elbows on the table? ;-)

Userpics take up far more system resources than an image in your ScrapBook. They appear in dropdowns frequently and show up so many places on the site, it's not an even comparison. The tools for userpic management are also not designed to work with as many userpics as we have now - the interfaces would positively crumble under 1000 userpics. Because of these and other reasons they've always been kept separate and I don't see that changing any time soon.

(And, my elbows go anywhere they please. Although if I'm at a fancy restaurant I tend to watch what other people are doing so I don't stick out too much.)

millieweasley: Why is it that you get so few userpictures at LJ in comparison to other blogg-sites? Wouldn't it be reasonable that you got for example, 15 for a free account, 30 for plus account holders and 100 for paid users?

We're always looking to make sure that users (regardless of account type) have as many userpics and features as is practical. We have recently (well, relatively) doubled the amount of userpics accounts get as well as introduced loyalty userpics for some account types.

The truth is, userpics are one of the LJ features that demand the most resources on the system. Other services that use LiveJournal's open source platform don't usually have as many users, so the resource demand for serving more userpics isn't as high. And of course, they don't have as many costs since we do all the core development for the software they're using.

So, while we're always looking for ways we can add more userpics for everybody, we're also hoping to find more ways to make them useful. Userpics are a large part of such upcoming features as LJ Talk, though, so stay tuned!

supersat: any plans for /singles/?

Why, Karl, are you looking? ;-)

But seriously, no - I've heard no plans. Some suggestions to chop the feature entirely, but it's almost too good to kill. A great source of amusement, etc.

...

Well, that's it for now. We've got more answer filled goodness coming right at you over the next few days, stay tuned.

question and answer, round one

Mon, 25 Sep 2006 19:44:45 GMT

Hello, and welcome to the first set of responses to the questions we got. We'll be splitting them all up amongst ourselves, so you'll be seeing other LJ staff members posting responses to some of your questions over the course of the next week or two. (I'll also be posting more responses later on in the week, when I get a chance to answer more!)

So, here we go!

malone: Why did you get rid of the homer subject icon from years and years ago?

-- Because we didn't quite have permission to use it. ;) I'm not sure whether we specifically got a complaint from the copyright owners, or whether we removed it just to be safe, but we removed it to avoid running into any trouble for having used it without being authorized to do so.

neurophyre: Why can users delete comments from threads they start in communities in which they are not mods?

-- Our stance is that anything you post to the site is yours. Any comment you post, any entry you post, you own it. To that end, it also means that you can control how that content is used. So we won't stop people from deleting their own content; if we did otherwise, it'd take that control out of their hands. (This is the same sort of logic we use in not allowing community maintainers to edit entries made in their community.) Ultimately, anything that a user posts is assumed to be owned by them, and so they're free to choose to delete any entry or comment they post.

pzelda: Will it be possible to do a search of people by their user #s in the future?

-- No, this won't be possible. I admit it'd be neat to see who created their account right before you or right after you (for example), but allowing people to look up users by their user numbers (also known as userids) means that someone would be able to create a list of all LiveJournal users. We don't want to allow this to happen -- we don't want people to be able to create a complete listing of the LJ userbase -- and so we specifically don't allow users to search by userids.

tasha: How could I get a job with livejournal? I love you guys.

-- Check out the job openings on the Six Apart website! Any job opportunities will be listed there. (Of course, you're always welcome to join one of the several volunteer opportunities as well!)

xbluemoonx: You know early adopters want to keep their "unique status" and not move to a different account. Why won't you give them a piece of the features like you do with other accounts. Like scrapbook space? A few more icons. Etc.

-- Early Adopter accounts are any accounts created before mid-September of 2000. That's the point where LJ split into offering the "free" and "paid" account levels, both of which offered a different featureset than what people had up until then. The "Early Adopters" account level was created so that people who were using the site before then could keep the features that they had had up until then. Early Adopters get all the benefits that were available at the time that they had used the site, even if those aren't available to Basic users anymore. We also won't take features away from them. But the featureset of the Early Adopter account has always been everything available to them in September 2000. Because of this, they don't necessarily get any of the new features we offer or create; if they want those features, they can upgrade to a Plus or Paid account.

smokyscott: Can you please change it back so protected entries can be viewed on friends' friends pages?

Well, we *can* -- though unfortunately, we won't. We made this change to help make sure your account and the accounts of your friends are secure. Here's the reasoning: if someone is able to access your LiveJournal "cookies" (small pieces of information we store on your computer that identify you to the site and tell us that your logged in), then they're able to have access to everything you have access to. Your account, your entries, your friends' protected entries, everything. We take every precaution we can to make sure that people *can't* steal your cookies or use them in a way that isn't permitted.

We're very paranoid about the security of your content, and while it's incredibly unlikely, ut there's always the chance someone will discover a new way of getting around our security. We implemented this change as part of an effort to minimize the damage if someone did manage to put malicious code in their journal style to "steal" your cookie. (It's not the only change we did, but you can find more information about that in the news announcement or in our development journal for the more technically-inclined.) Unfortunately it did mean that you can't see protected entries on friends' Friends pages anymore, which is an annoying side-effect, but we think security is more important.

justhuman: During the last sale, how many users opted for permanent accounts?

-- At least three, I know that for sure! ;) Seriously, though, I can't share those numbers, unfortunately.

lipsum: What is LJ's ratio of revenue from ads versus user purchases/merchandising?

-- Like in the previous question, I can't share specific numbers -- not even as a ratio. But I've seen a lot of people expressing sentiments like, "Well, LJ doesn't care about Paid users now that they have Plus accounts!" and that really can't be further from the truth. We care about all our account levels, and we work hard to balance the features and access everyone gets, and we also want to make sure that everyone can find an account level that fits what they use LJ for.

So if you're really asking "are ad-supported accounts more important than paid accounts?" -- not that I think you necessarily are, but a lot of people have -- the answer is that all of our accounts are important to us, and that we absolutely want to make sure people find value in their accounts, at whatever level. We created the Plus account for people who couldn't pay us directly for some reason or another, but still wanted some access to our premium features. Our goal has always been to give people a taste of the cool features to encourage them to want more. :)

longlostchild: Do you expect LiveJournal to be around long enough for me to get the maximum value out of the Permanent Account that I bought a little over a year ago?

-- I hope so! I can't predict the future, but I certainly hope that LJ is around for many, many years to come. And I mean that as a user of the site, not as an employee. I've been using this site for five years now, and like a many of us who work here, I have a great deal of my life stored here. So we'd be just as devastated if LJ went downhill as anyone else would -- this site is our home on the Internet, and we don't want to see anything bad happen to it. So I definitely hope that LJ stays around long enough for you to get the best value out of your permanent account.

tx_cronopio: It's 2006. We put a man on the moon 35 years ago. Why can't we have birthday notifications? :)

-- Let's go back to the beginning! We used to offer birthday notifications, where you'd get an email to remind you of your friends' birthdays. This system worked quite well for quite some time, until it would cause the site to lock up every night as the notifications were processed. So we disabled this feature -- site-wide usability is more important than any one given feature -- until we could figure out how to fix it. Unfortunately, nobody got around to fixing it, and the site grew bigger and bigger and bigger, and fixing the notifications would become more and more complicated and difficult. So it hasn't happened yet, even though we'd love to fix it up and make it work again, but we haven't gotten a chance to do that yet.

We've thought about integrating it into our notifications system -- we've gotten a lot of requests for this -- and it's certainly possible. It's kind of tricky, though: our notifications system only notifies you when something happens. A notification is triggered when a new comment is posted to an entry, or when someone uploads a userpic, or whatever. With birthday notifications, the person doesn't actually have to do anything -- I don't even have to be using LJ on my birthday, but we would still need to send out a notification. So we've been trying to come up with alternate ways of implementation that won't hinge on the birthday person actually doing something on the site.

montagmorgen: Why is LJ even considering trying to sort the older LJ users from the younger LJ users using the Vox deal? Is diversity no longer important to LJ?

-- That's totally not the intention of Vox. As Krissy explained a few months ago, we have no intention of splitting the userbase by age. Vox and LJ are two separate sites, and the choice is available for anyone to decide what they want to use. Some people find Vox better suited to what they want out of blogging, and some people will find LJ better. It's up to each individual person to decide which site they want -- or if they want to use both! We're not going to force anyone to leave LJ, not at all.

Everyone's welcome here on LJ, and nobody is going to be asked to leave if they don't want to. One of the greatest things I've found about LJ is, like you said, the sheer diversity of the people you can meet here. I have people on my Friends list whose ages range from 16 to 50, from all over the world, and of all sorts of backgrounds and religions and beliefs. That's something we find very valuable, and we don't want to do anything that would harm that.

livejournal question and answer

Fri, 22 Sep 2006 19:49:42 GMT

We haven't done this in quite some time (not since 2002!) and we thought it'd be fun to do this again. A bunch of us are interested in doing a round of questions and answers about LiveJournal -- we'll take your questions, split 'em up amongst ourselves, and answer 'em as best as we can.

View Poll: #827671

If you can't fit your question into the box, please feel free to comment! All comments here are screened, and I'll make sure to add them to our list.

We'll accept questions up till 11:59pm Eastern time, on Monday, September 25!

Obligatory Disclaimers:
* We'll consider every question we get, but we may not be able to answer them all fully (for instance, we can't disclose particular statistics because the beancounters won't let us ;).
* We also reserve the right to reject any question ("do you enjoy feasting on innocent users' souls?") for whatever reason, but we'll try to avoid doing that.
* We have no way of predicting how many questions we'll get, so there's a possibility that we'll be completely overwhelmed with questions. It may not be possible for us to answer everything. (We'll try our best, though!)

friends and friending policies

Thu, 21 Sep 2006 01:26:26 GMT

Thank you to everyone for your comments on my previous post! We've all really enjoyed reading everyone's responses -- and you're still welcome to comment if there's more you'd like to say. (To address a few of the comments, though: no, this isn't Data Collection for The Next Great Feature That Everyone Will Surely Love™ -- I promise that it's nothing of the sort. It's just an honest request for feedback about something something we've discussed amongst ourselves on a number of occasions.)

The second topic I wanted to bring up deals with friends and "friending policies" (for lack of a better term). Everyone uses their Friends list in a different way -- some use it purely as a reading list, some use it to dictate who can read their journals, and some are in between. Some people are willing to add anyone to their Friends list, others are very selective about whom they add, and some are in between. And then you get into the use of custom filters, which adds a whole 'nother layer of complication. So, my questions for this round are:

* Is your Friends list more "the journals you read" or "the people who can see your Friends-only entries"? How do you use your Friends list?

* How do you find the people you add to your Friends list -- interest searches, recommendation, community memberships, something else? How do you decide who to add to your Friends list?

* What sort of "friending policies" do you have in place (even if you don't specifically call them that)? What factors do you take into account before friending or defriending someone?

popularity on livejournal

Mon, 18 Sep 2006 22:04:33 GMT

LiveJournal is primarily a journaling site, rather than a social networking site, and so it's interesting to note that there's a different way of judging who the ~~"popular"~~ "influential" users are. I know that there aren't many people who are universally recognized, but I'm sure you can all think of someone who's highly respected in your group of friends.

There may even be some users outside of your group of friends, but are still recognized by a large portion of your Friends list. For example, most people probably don't know bradfitz personally, but you probably know that he started LiveJournal, and chances are that your friends know who he is, too. There are probably similar people based on your interests (popular icon makers? famous fic writers? etc), too.

So, I'm wondering:

* What makes someone popular/influential on LJ?
* What makes someone highly-respected within a certain group?
* What attributes make someone well-known? (Either in a positive or a negative way)

(There's a second part to this that I'll post in a few days, but I think this particular topic could generate a fair deal of discussion that I decided to split them up.)

a runoff vote!

Mon, 31 Jul 2006 18:12:56 GMT

Thank you to everyone who voted in the last poll! We're going to do one final run-off poll of the top three names, again listed in a completely random order. (And, as before, first name listed is for the horizontal, second one is for the vertical.)

View Poll: #782400

Thank you all for your feedback! Poll is now closed. Looks like we're going with Horizon/Vertigo!