LJ DDoS causing import (and possibly crosspost) problems

[denise]

The DDoS mitigation steps that LiveJournal is taking to make sure their users can continue to access the site have, unfortunately, meant that third-party applications (such as DW's importer!) temporarily can't access the site. This means that importing from LJ is temporarily disabled again, because all imports would fail due to being blocked. We'll let you know when they're re-enabled!

Many people are also experiencing problems with crossposts. If you try to crosspost an entry and it doesn't immediately crosspost, your crosspost attempt has not mysteriously wandered off into the deepest darkest depths of the internet: until you receive a failure message in your inbox or the crosspost attempt succeeds, the worker is still trying to contact LJ in order to make your crosspost, even if you then edit the entry and the crosspost box is unchecked. (The crosspost box will not be checked on the entry edit page until the crosspost is successful.) So, just hang tight until you get the final failure message in your inbox, then wait a day or two and try to crosspost again by editing the entry, checking the crosspost box, and hitting 'save'.

Because of the problems with accessing LJ, and in order to help reduce the traffic on LJ's servers, we've lowered the number of times a crosspost attempt will try to contact LJ before failing and we've extended the delays between attempts (it was five tries at an interval of 10 seconds, 30 seconds, 60 seconds, 5 minutes, and 10 minutes; now it's three tries at 5 minutes, 15 minutes, and 30 minutes.) This may help more crossposts to succeed because of the reduced load, or it might have no effect at all, but we're hoping it will also help reduce the traffic to LJ and help them recover from their DDoS more quickly.

Best of luck to LJ with their DDoS mitigation efforts!

Comments

[brigantine]

Ah, so that is what's going on. I was wondering. Thanks for the heads up! :)

[monanotlisa]

Thanks for elaborating! <3

[havocthecat]

Thanks for the information!

[falena]

Thanks for the update.

[seventhe]

Oh, gosh, I thought I had done something stupid to my crossposting settings. Thanks for the update!

[kore]

Thank you for keeping us in the loop!

[dogmatix]

Ahah, yeah, I thought it might be something on LJ's side, since I've noticed then being a bit laggy the past few days. Thanks for the info. :)

[0jack]

Awesome username. /randomness

[milady_dragon]

Thanks! I attempted to crosspost a Big Bang today, and only three of the ten chapters went through. That explains it.

[seaivy]

I's like my friends on L J to read my thoughts but it really doesn't matter.
I post mainly for me. And I post here because I like the format and I feel secure here. And you pop up when I click on - no waiting.
Thanks!

Censorship by DDoS

[babysprite]

It's really a shame, Ms. D; that people see no better than to try to censor via the Internet. Doing so makes it harder on everyone else who uses it. One of my favorite communities, Revision3 were DDoSed for hosting their own content on a BitTorrent server. Tell me that's not sad.

You have to do what you have to do,
and all of us here appreciate you.

Thanks, Ms. D.

[montuos]

As always, thanks for keeping us posted! I will try to be more patient waiting for the crosspost notifications.

[ironed_orchid]

Thanks for the update.

[hendrikboom]

We need tools for tracking down the culprits.

[archangelbeth]

Tracking them down and electrifying their keyboards...

[ashoakandthorn]

Thank you for letting us know!

[jb_slasher]

Thanks for the information! I was wondering since I have a support request open relating to crossposting so maybe I just need to wait a while and then close it if the problem goes away which I hope it will.

[auronlu]

Thank you very much!

You know, the internet allows us to keep tabs on current events in such odd ways.

Political elections in Russia = LJ gets hit with a DDOS attack

Major earthquake in technological / urban area = Twitter fail whale overloaded by 1 million simultaneous tweets of "OMG #earthquake!"

[sollers]

Many thanks for your keeping us informed as usual - one of the great things here. On seeing the news about the Russian elections I was expecting trouble with LJ; ; they've got mmassive problems that they seem to be doing the best they can to deal with, and it's a pity that that has been affecting DW, but you are clearly doing the best you can as well.

[marilla_pm67]

Thanks for the update. Was wondering what happened to my crossposting....

It's just sad to see that LJ is subjected to those attacks every other month... well more time to spend here.

Sam

[subluxate]

I only notice problems with crossposting if the post is filtered; if it's at my default setting (friends-only), it's fine.

[kj_svala]

Thank you for the info!

[lucridlucifel]

Thank you for informing. I was boggled for a moment, wondering what became of my crossposts to LJ.

[nebris]

Bloody Russian elections. -.-

It's screwing up my Twitter reposts, too. *mumbles Russian expletives*

~M~

[kittydesade]

Huh. Well, that explains that. Thanks for letting us know!

[pauamma]

Just in case the importer and crossposter don't do this: http://lj-dev.livejournal.com/845869.html?thread=9152813#t9152813 (not relevant until the DDoS eases up, but good to know)

[elialshadowpine]

Aha! I was wondering what was up with cross-posting. Thanks for the heads up!