Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Back in December of the last year, when the Russian company SUP bought LiveJournal, I wrote this post, in which, among other things, I said that it wasn’t a very good thing for LiveJournal.  A few things happened since then, which confirmed my worries.  But the biggest of them is unfolding right now.

SUP removed basic (free) accounts from the registration form.  They have also introduced plenty of annoying advertising to existing free accounts.  Lots and lots of people got really annoyed with that.  In fact, there even was a boycott with some users not updating their diaries for 24 hours, while others going as far as deleting their diaries (no worries yet, since there is a way to restore the diary).

If you missed this whole story, here is a CNews article in English and here is a Lenta.ru article in Russian which cover the basic story.  For more, check numerous posts on the blogosphere.

Most of the people I know, saw it coming.  And this is surely not the last incident in this story.

Dear Mr.Spammer,

you are the ugliest and stinkiest piece of human trash, abusing the technology, annoying people, and occupying their valuable time with your silly activities.  Please stop. Now.  If you feel like  you have nothing much else to do, feel free to go to the darkest corner of our  planet, and die!  I hate you.  People hate you.  Computers hate you.  The universe hates you. So, pretty please, with sugar on top, cease to exist.

P.S.: None of your comments will make it to my blog.  Thanks to Akismet, Gmail, and PHP and Perl.

P.P.S: I really hate you very much.

Now, here is another reason to love WordPress.com folks:

 Today, one of those developments comes to fruition — everyone’s free upload space has been increased 60x from 50mb to 3,000mb. To get half that much space (1GB) at our nearest competitor, Typepad, you’d pay at least $300 a year. We’re doing the same thing for free.
Our hope is that much in the same way Gmail transformed the way people think about email, we’ll give people the freedom to blog rich media without having to worry about how many kilobytes are left in their upload space.

For a few years now, since I started to use real blogging software (such as NucleusCMS and then WordPress), anyone could register on this blog and become a member.  Membership didn’t offer much though.  The main feature members have that others don’t is that they can work with the archive of their comments on this site.  For the rest of the visitors, what was posted, was posted, and there was no way to change it.

Together with a few legitimate users, hundreds of abusers (SPAM posters, bots, etc) registered.  Sometimes their registrations were cleaned out by one of the plugins.  At other times, I removed them manually.  And then still a few of them stayed, masking as real human beings and not doing much damage.

As I mentioned recently, I have installed WP AJAX Edit Comments plugin, which allows comment posting folks to edit their own comments during a certain period of time (15 minutes). This works pretty well for typing mistakes, premature postings, and that sort of things, which appear to be 99% of all issues people have with their own comments.

Since there is no more need for user registration, I have closed it.  I have also removed all user accounts from this site that don’t have at least one comment.  If you think that you need an account, you can send me a message, including your email, username, and a reason for why you want it (I’m really curious).  I’ll make you one.   If you have an account, but forgot your credentials, drop me a line, and we’ll reset it together.  For the rest of you, just use the commenting form and you should be fine.

I don’t know exactly how all those online shops do during the Christmas seasons (probably they are blooming), but I can show you what two weeks or so of Christmas and New Year’s holidays can do to one’s blog statistics.  Here is a screenshot of weekly stats for my blog:

X-axis shows a few last weeks of 2007 as well as a couple of weeks of 2008.  Y-axis shows the number of visits this blog had for each of those weeks.  A home-made red marker with a word “here” tries to bring your attention to the celebration of Christmas and New Year represented on this graph.

As much as it was expected, that was quite a dive I must say.  Reasons?  I’d say there are only two:

1. Many people are busy with shopping, celebrations, travels, and other holiday matters.  Mostly off-line.
2. Many companies closed their offices and that minimized many employees’ access to the Web.

Gladly, things are rushing back to normal.