worryingly jolly batman

Look guys, I'm not at all thrilled about the facebook/twitter fuckery, but let's be real. I just saw a comment on the news post saying

now if someone could tell us why there isn't a total opt out on the fb/twitter crossposting (as in stopping others from posting things that would link to my lj without my consent), that would be great.

SERIOUSLY GUYS, people can already link to your livejournal without your consent. It's called 'linking'. They can do it on facebook and on twitter. They can do it to comment threads and to your friendslocked posts. They can copy your content and post it elsewhere (although that is obviously a Bad Thing which I don't defend). They can crosspost anything they like from facebook - and in fact there is already a feature you can set up on facebook to have your LJ updates go directly there! NOTHING HAS CHANGED except LJ has made this slightly easier and it might be too easy to do it by accident. That's a problem, but this is not THE DEVIL and it's not actually letting anyone do anything they couldn't already do themselves with only a tiny fraction more effort!

Also there's this thing that is weirding me out: a lot of people are saying "do not crosspost my posts or your comments at my posts to FB/Twitter". Now, I do not really like or use facebook that much. But it seems to me that if you have made a public post in your journal about, say ... Yuletide. And I thought that post was interesting and I commented on it and then I linked to that post on Twitter with the hash tag #yuletide ... I'm not allowed to do that? Like, it would never even have OCCURRED to me that I couldn't do that. And if it was a post on social justice, I could well have linked to it from my FB with a comment like "this discussion is interesting." But my flist is FULL of people saying "don't link my stuff on FB!!!!!" Am I wrong, or is it sort of *your* responsibility if you want to be anonymous to make your livejournal, you know, anonymous? I am not FB friends with most of my LJ friends and I really do not understand what would be so damaging for, say, sixth_light if I linked that from my FB and said "this post about Heroes made me laugh!" OBVIOUSLY I would not say "this post about Heroes by [her real name + FB link] made me laugh" because her LJ is clearly anonymous.

I GUESS MY POINT IS: explain your position to me because it seems needlessly and confusingly draconian. linking is normal, isn't it?

I STILL MISS YOU LJ/DW. WHEN I GET BACK WE'LL TALK ABOUT PORN AND SHIT.

So there's been a bunch of trolling lately at greatpoets, including porno, people f*cking with tags, etc etc e-annoying-t-c. This is a cool community and obviously this is ANNOYING and difficult for its rather overworked mods. There was a post earlier today by the chief (and, I think until very recently only) mod who basically requested suggestions for what to do about spamming and erratic tagging. She mentioned a couple of options, one of them being making the community paid and "real" account only. Now, I can see how if you're getting a lot of spam, having approved-only membership would be really useful because it ensures you get way fewer of the casual spammers with, you know, no journal- hence "real" accounts ie accounts that are obviously being genuinely used. I think there's a lot of margin for error here, of course, but it'd be better.

But paid accounts only? I mean, of course most spammers are going to be non-paid account, but there are tonnes and TONNES of non-paid users out there- I am generally one of them, although not currently- who are perfectly peaceable and not-trolls. Is this general procedure anywhere? Is there a precedent for this kind of thing?

Anyway, a bunch of people (myself included) said in the comments of that post that they thought paid-account only was a bad idea for pretty much that reason. Then there was another trolling, and a few hours later the maintainer- who I haven't seen much of, frankly, but I guess I just might not have seen him/her active before- came in, deleted it, and posted saying it was going paid-account only except for "some free account users" who could comment at that post to have their application reviewed, or whatever. A couple- like three- people said, with varying degrees of niceness, what they thought of that (buried among at least a dozen people asking to be allowed to remain on) and then the maintainer posted again saying basically everyone's so ungrateful for her hard work in maintaining the community that it was going to be deleted in 24 hours. WTF? Totally out of character for community & just... silly.

*sigh* I like that community. fssssss.

if it ends up on fandom_wank, I might cry.

ETA: AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHHAaHAHAHAHAHAHA there's a rational explanation for this, apparently: the person I thought was the maintainer was a TROLL disguised as the maintainer. I could almost applaud. *sigh*

I still think paid-only is a siriusly stoopid concept.