Inverarity is not a Scottish village

Nice fan composition by zephyranthia here. Thanks, zephyranthia!

Who are you people? Why are you here?

I have about 140 people who have friended me right now. I don't know most of you at all. This is fine — as I say in my user info, there is no need to ask permission to friend or defriend me, and I have yet to ever post anything f-locked. I usually check out the LJs of people who have friended me now and then, but I don't usually friend back unless I actually know you. (For some arbitrary Internet value of "know.")

But I do wonder who y'all are. I know some of the folks who have friended me have almost certainly abandoned LiveJournal long since. But I'd guess there are least a few dozen of you who are still reading my entries but have never commented here. You are not required to, of course. But if you would indulge my idle curiosity by answering this poll, I'd really appreciate it. (Yes, I did a similar poll some time back.)

The other questions are because now and then I think I might like to start blogging about more than writing and book reviews and fan stuff, but then I decide the time and mental energy it would take to mostly say stuff other people say better, and ban idiots, would aggravate me. One or two trolls can be enormously draining. Hence there is a trade-off between being quiet and unbothered or having a more active commentariat and periodic flamewars.

Lastly, LiveJournal seems to be in a death spiral. More and more people talk about abandoning it. I confess I am not entirely sure why, since it's still just as free and functional as every other blogging network out there, and I'm sorry but tumblr and twitter just confuse me. But who can fathom the ways of the Internet, which decides that Myspace shall become So Last Decade while Facebook shall prosper? So when I ponder the possibility of doing more "blogging," I also ponder the possibility of moving off of LiveJournal.

I probably won't do any of those things, because I'm lazy and it would be time I'm not spending on writing. But please answer my poll anyway!

[Poll #1887616]

A whole bunch of LiveJournal communities that were previously unmoderated seem to have gone onto moderated status. Anyone know what's up with that? Did LJ do a global setting change?

ETA: Mystery solved. It looks like LJ has made it harder to post lots of links and images in a community post, probably to foil spammers. Hence, my link-heavy posts are now going into moderation queues.

An anonymous commenter commented on one of the AQATSA cover posts with "Remember, this is art for art's sake."

I was not sure whether it was a spammer or a legitimate commenter, since it didn't make much sense, and resembled the comments bots usually leave on random entries, but it was somewhat related to the post. Since LJ screened it automatically, I just deleted it.

Then the same comment got posted again a few days later, along with a comment about "technical issues."

So, anonymous commenter: if you're a real person and that was meant to be a real comment, my apologies for deleting it both times, but this is why I ask anons to sign their posts with a username or something. Especially if you are going to leave cryptic one-line comments that look suspiciously like spam. Nowadays my delete finger is getting twitchier, as I move closer towards disabling anonymous comments altogether.

ETA: Also, LiveJournal's anti-spam measures seem to be automatically screening comments from anons with increasing frequency, so be aware that if you post anonymously, it might not be visible to anyone else until I notice it was screened and unscreen it.

I usually get email notifications to any comments on my LJ, or in response to my posts and comments elsewhere, but I haven't gotten any for the last day. Is it just me, or is LJ whack right now?

Also, the frequency of spam has been increasingly lately. Spam annoys me very, very much. I have not quite gotten to the point where I'm going to turn off anonymous comments, but I may do it if spam continues to increase. I know some of you don't want to create a LJ account just so you can comment on my blog, which is why I keep anonymous commenting enabled, but damn, LJ really needs to get their act together.

Also, thank you for all the suggestions about how Alexandra can sneak on board a bus or a train, but like I said, I've already solved that problem. :)

(Jeez, some of you are eager to corrupt a minor. Confound a Muggle? Magically steal money from an ATM? Not that such behavior is completely beneath her... And as much as Alexandra might wish her parents would let her have a credit card -- not a chance!)

ETA: LiveJournal is still borked. I'm getting email notifications delivered to me up to 5 days after they were posted.

I've been puzzled the last couple of days seeing random comments from brand new LJ accounts (with no posts) on my LJ and elsewhere. Below are a couple of examples:

no? wonder hes always so d*mn grouchy!!
SilverBerenznoff23

0:05-0:10 soo funny but that still is sad....R.I.P? snape :(
rosefan12

Obviously, this is spam, but since there were no links (that I could see), I couldn't figure out what the point was. It took viewing the actual HTML source to find it. They've cleverly embedded a long list of links to Russian porn sites in their profile in a way that's invisible in your browser, but not to search engines.

So, if you see comments like this appearing on your LJ, I recommend you simply delete them (and check all the various options to ban the user and report spam).

Many thanks to ebilgatoloco, who sent me a Dreamwidth invite (thanks to hermoinejean7 for sending me one, too).

You can find it here. Right now it's just an out-of-date clone of this LJ; I will let you know when and if I add more to it.

But hey, notice something else? Well, hopefully you do, if LiveJournal didn't lie to me. If they did, then you aren't reading this at all.

Yup, I went ahead and bought a rename token. I am inverarity68 no longer; now I'm just plain old inverarity.

If I understood the FAQ correctly, f-lists and everything should have been automatically updated, and people going to the old link will be redirected here.

Umm, hello? Anyone there? Can you seeeeeee meeeeeeeeeee?