Mat Bowles

Hey everyone, guess what? Yup, you've got to log in (again) and are probably going to encounter some more problems for a bit longer. It appears that putting news, lj_dev and lj_maintenance on your main friends page is currently an esential plan.

Great. You see, the thing is, from what I can tell, they could've predicted some of these problems, they could have warned us, they could have... You get the picture.

So, here's how to deal with this sort of thing and not piss off your paying customers. ( A list of what they should have done )
Here's what Livejournal have instead done:( The list of what they did do )
Yup, I'm pissed. Keeping your paying customers happy is something that businesses need to do. I love LJ, I like the flexibility, the utility, the community. But the management and PR people suck. I effectively work in marketing/PR (it's a significant part of my job), and I know pissing people off by not keeping them informed is a bad idea. When the people you piss off most are the paying customers that your business model relies on heavily? Clusterfuck.

Short version: log in (again). Oh yeah, one good thing, Manage your login sessions (if they get it working...)

In their infinite wisdom, LiveJournal have expired everyones cookie without warning us. There were already some logout problems due to the new subdomain as well. I didn't realise until page 2 of my friends page, clicked reply; reloading got me 3 friends locked posts from people.

They're doing it all for our own good, but, well, they're announcing things so badly it's pissing people off. Why doesn't that really surprise me?

Change your password

Seriously, according to this blog/news post:

several Bantown members spoke at length in an online instant-message chat with Security Fix. During the chat, members of the group claimed to have used the Javascript holes to hijack more than 900,000 LiveJournal accounts..."However, we have only used approximately five hundred of these cookies so far, so it is impossible to tell whether this sample is statistically valid. Still, a massive number have been compromised."

In other words, they know 900,000 passwords, but have used 500 of them, so they may have yours without you knowing it.