Fifty Ways To Leave (without unduly inconveniencing yourself).

[icarus]

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.

Comments

[fractalreality.livejournal.com]

If someone mentioned you drew that, you probably would get banned.
In the eyes of the law, graphic depictions of children in ANY form are paedophilic; to allow them to appear on your site is the same as allowing child porn to be shared.

...I'm not saying I agree entirely with how this law works but if we dont stick to it, we'll be the ones to suffer and not those that posted it.

The mantra is act first, think later; unfortunately the first people to fall foul of an unseen event are always treated the harshest. But then, personally, I'd much rather lj learns from their mistakes in harsh dealings than ignore it and get the entire thing shut down - which is the first in a long line of punishments they'd get if someone were to pursue the matter further.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

I disagree. I think laws like this should be fought. I know someone who's on a pedophile list because, drunk, he slept with a 16-year-old who got into a gay bar with fake ID. These laws are bullshit and don't distinguish between pedophiles, teenagers who sleep with each other after one of the two crosses the age line, and guys like my friend who just screwed up.

The pedophile hysteria is creating lists that look a lot like our Homeland Security terrorist lists -- a total useless mess.

I feel we should fight this stupidity before it does more damage.

1 - In letter campaigns to wrong-headed senators who need your vote (I've already contacted McCain).

2 - Educating those who are afraid of technology and are therefore being lured along by hate groups like Perverted Justice.

3 - Then, finally, by making it incredibly difficult to enforce by increasing the number of NC-17 fics and art available, supporting the affected artists, and spreading the works that exist all over the internet on difficult-to-reach servers such as those in Russia.

Mirror it everywhere. The more offensive the better. That's my feeling.

Icarus

[fractalreality.livejournal.com]

Oh, I agree *totally* with laws needing changing; I know of people that have been stuck in that situation.

However, the law is the law until it is changed - people being lied to, not cool, but underage kids depicted in sexual acts with adults will always be seen as advocating child pornography, fictional or not.

I've always thought the image Vs literary argument was a shady one that needs revising, but images are deemed to have a greater, more immediate impact than words (how little they know).

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Ah, gotcha.

Things aren't looking good for LJ right now. Brad Fitzpatrick, LJ's creator, is leaving for Google. They're looking for a buyer (apparently) and they're not doing their much-awaiting IPO as a result. As one of the top 65 internet sites in the world, the buyers (if they materialize) will have dollar signs in their eyes.

This is the first shoe falling.

[fractalreality.livejournal.com]

The best thing that could happen to lj at the moment is if facebook or even google picked it up; surely they know how big a cash cow this could be if they reverted back to its' original purpose.