Dreamwidth Maintenance

Привет and welcome to our new Russian friends from LiveJournal! We are happy to offer you a new home. We will not require identification for you to post or comment. We also do not cooperate with Russian government requests for any information about your account unless they go through a United States court first. (And it hasn't happened in 16 years!)

Importing your journal from ЖЖ may be slow. There are a lot of you, with many posts and comments, and we have to limit how fast we download your information from ЖЖ so they don't block us. Please be patient! We have been watching and fixing errors, and we will go back to doing that after the holiday is over.

I am very sorry that we can't translate the site into Russian or offer support in Russian. We are a much, much smaller company than LiveJournal is, and my high school Russian classes were a very long time ago :) But at least we aren't owned by Sberbank!

С Новым Годом, and welcome home!

EDIT: Большое спасибо всем за помощь друг другу в комментариях! Я ценю каждого, кто предоставляет нашим новым соседям информацию, понятную им без необходимости искать её в Google. :) И спасибо вам за терпение к моему русскому переводу с помощью Google Translate! Прошло уже много-много лет со школьных времен!

Thank you also to everyone who's been giving our new neighbors a warm welcome. I love you all ❤️

As some folks have noticed: we've actually found some time to run the maintenance script that makes deleted usernames available for re-use! We always swear we're going to do this more regularly and it always winds up getting postponed for something more urgent, so it's been a good while since the last time we've done it, and I apologize.

There's a lot of very long and boring reasons why it gets done so rarely, but the extremely quick explanation is that the system is one of the things that most shows its age (and would be hardest to bring into the 21st century) and needs a lot of manual intervention and babysitting that's really hard to automate: it's hard for us to find the time to do it regularly. (There's also the human factor of it being a combination of "it's annoying and manual and can cause a bunch of load issues" and "it's never hair-on-fire-urgent so we don't need to do it right this second"; no matter how hard we try to stop ourselves from procrastinating on 'ugh' tasks, some of it happens anyway and this is very much one of the ones that is most subject to it.)

If you'd like to rename your account to a username that now shows as "deleted and purged" (or to any other name!), check out How do I change my username? The fee for username changes is to cover the extra system load and support issues that renaming causes: again, it's a really old system and deals with a lot of assumptions that are very baked into the architecture of the site and almost impossible to change, which is why it can be a little confusing to people at times. We've tried our best to make it intuitive, but if you've got questions on how it works or something happens that you didn't expect when you rename your account, drop a support request in the Account Payments category and we'll do our best to give you a hand.

Because this always comes up right about now: if there's a username that you're interested in but the account is not deleted, there's no way to rename to it. Once someone registers a username, it's theirs until they choose to delete it, even if it doesn't look like they're using their account: we don't delete accounts for inactivity. Likewise, a reminder: the rename token system is the only secure way to change your username. Please don't trade or sell accounts or accept a traded or sold account from someone else! A traded account can never be made fully secure and the original owner can always take control of it away from you at any time, plus it carries the risk of being caught up in a Terms of Service enforcement action if the original owner does something severe enough to cause us to suspend all of their accounts on the site.

The shop may be temporarily unavailable on and off for the next day or so! We apologize for the hassle.

A few days ago we let you know about spam prevention measures that we were taking to help stem some of the flood of garbage. One of those temporary measures included geoblocking all IPs from several of the countries that are our largest source of spam. This did (as we knew it inevitably would) have some collateral damage for real users, and we're very sorry!

We're continuing to experiment: this time we've slightly expanded the range of countries we're geoblocking to include the ones that we held off on geoblocking because it would affect too much legitimate use, but we've limited the geoblocking only to the account creation page. This should mean that if you were having trouble accessing the site because of geoblocks, you should be able to access 99% of the site without a problem, and the only page you won't be able to access is the account creation page. With luck, this should cut back heavily on our spam account creation without disrupting legitimate use of the site. The current list of countries that are geoblocked from account creation are Bangladesh, Cambodia, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Morocco, Pakistan, Singapore, Turkey, and Vietnam. (If you're an existing user from one of those countries and you'd like to make an additional account, email [email protected] with the username you'd like to register and we can register it for you. If the number of requests gets to be enough that it's taking up too much of our time, we may have to pause this until we can build automated exceptions, but we'll start there.)

We will continue to monitor the results of these experiments and adjust as necessary: when we do one of these experiments, we always make sure to define in advance what "too much interference with legitimate use" will look like, and we try very hard to stick to it. I apologize to everyone who's been collateral damage in our efforts to filter out more of the goddamn spammers.