Fifty Ways To Leave (without unduly inconveniencing yourself).

I've been following the whole debacle where two fan artists who posted Harry Potter drawings have had their journals suspended, all their unrelated journals suspended, and been issued permanent bans from LJ. It's now officially called boldthrough. The fact that LJ tried to cover its ass by unlinking deleted journals (thus no more obvious icarus) has irritated me the most. Cowards. Pick a policy, make it clear, and stick with it. Then you don't need to cover your ass when you've followed your own damned rules.

I described the whole situation to WG and he got that narrow-eyed look he gets when he's seeing through the bullshit. The guys at his work says he looks like a cop, and I agree.

He said finally, "They're being threatened at LJ."

Yep.

Based on the Rolling Stone article, Perverted Justice is just another hate group, one that's got a popular target. Like the KKK in the post-Civil War south.

The real fear is not online predators. It's a fear of technology with "online sex predators!" as a buzzword.

Regarding moving to another service:

It's hard for me to move. I'm scattered across four fandoms. The HP readers and friends might pack up and leave while the Stargate Atlantis and Supernatural people stay put. Wherever we go, we'll face the same problems from people who can't distinguish between art and reality.

I support the idea of a fan-created blog network, and I think femmequixotic's response -- "Let's think it through first" -- is the right one.

That's how I left Earthlink. I didn't get up in arms or inconvenience myself.

- First I bought my Slashcity account and moved all my fics to it from my old Earthlink page.
- Then I changed whatever links to my old site I could.
- I added new fics, got everyone up to speed and in the habit of using my new site for about six months beforehand.
- My next move should have been a redirect to the new site but I didn't know how to do that.
- I'd already moved my email to Yahoo and Gmail.

Finally, Earthlink pissed me off one more time, with a service outage for three days that they didn't even apologize for. When I canceled my service, I was transfered to a hard-sell guy in India.

Hard sell guy: "But you will lose all your contacts to your email account."
Icarus: "I use gmail."

He never brought up the web space which was the main thing keeping me there. I guess he understood I was serious.

Make it easy for yourself to move:

1) Go back through your posts and link all your art and fanfiction to a website or archive. If you have a comment feature there, so much the better. This has the plus of enabling you to track hit counts on your stories and protects you from any problems whether you leave or not (Slashcity.com is one fandom friendly option and their tiny plan is only $24 a year).

2) Back up your LJ at your leisure (how-to back-up instructions here). I found this process excruciatingly slow, by the way (archiving program LJArchive here).

3) Post elsewhere as well as in LJ from here on out. I understand if you use Semagic (download Semagic XP version here) you can post to multiple journals at once (snapetoy's how-to post to multiple journals here). That could save you many headaches as you're backing up every time you post.

4) Keep up on fanarchive and the latest fan efforts to create our own service. Do a little research. (fandom_flies is one community tracking the progress and direction of an exodus.)

Once you have a better alternative, or your flist is emptying like rats on a sinking ship ... all you have to do is turn the key in the ignition.

Twittering a bit.

I've given in and signed up with Twitter (yes, that's the drawing I did of wildernessguru), using it as a means to avoid writing for updates on fic progress:

Here.

Neat, huh? If it becomes annoying to use or I find I'm doing more twittering than writing (right now I have, oh, one person friended/followed/whatever on that thing) then I'll give it up.

In other news, wildernessguru is watching old SG-1 episodes. This is a really good show.