Import and crosspost problems from LJ

[denise]

Due to a change LJ made yesterday afternoon in how they process cookies and logins, some aspects of our crossposter and importer will not work at the moment:

* If you have chosen to enter your LiveJournal password every time you crosspost an entry, the crossposts will currently fail. The solution to fix this is to save your LiveJournal password on Dreamwidth (that method uses a different codepath, which has not changed) temporarily, instead of entering it each time. When we've been able to fix our code to use LJ's new login protocol methods, the option to enter your password each time will work again and you can remove the saved password.

* If you are importing content from LiveJournal, and choose to import your comments as well as your entries, the process will fail. (This is because comment import uses a different login codepath than entry import, and the codepath the comment import uses is the one that has changed.) To work around this, uncheck the 'comments' box when you're importing. When we've been able to fix our code to use LJ's new login protocol methods, the option to import comments will work again, and you can run a new import with comments included at that point. (Your entries will not be duplicated if you import again, and the comments will be added to the correct entries.)

I'm really sorry about the inconvenience and hassle! We're working with the LJ code changes to see what changes we need to make on our end in order to make things work again, and as soon as we can program and test a fix, and confirm that LJ's changes are stable and will not be changing further, we will make sure the fix gets pushed live onto the site.

Keep an eye here on dw_maintenance for further details.

Comments

[capri0mni]

Aha! that might explain this particular head-desk provocation, when I tried to request a new password change code from LJ yesterday evening:

"EVERY. Single. Time. I fill out the form, and that damned reCaptcha, the page just RELOADS, and asks me to fill out the form again -- I've tried this eight times in a row, already (one time, it even asked me to type in Cyrillic characters, which my keyboard does not even have)."

Had to create an entirely new account just to submit a report on this to them. I got an email this morning saying they've fixed it, and I should try again.

So maybe the bugs aren't all on this side... Good luck to us all (or should I say: "Break a pixel?")!

[mumblemutter]

Oh, that explains it then! I was just trying to sync friend groups for the first time in months, and was wondering why the verification process was taking so long. Shit timing on my part.

Good luck getting this solved! *\o/*

[rachelmanija]

How do you save your password?

ETA: Never mind, I found it.

[denise]

Hee, I just clicked to come reply and saw the edits!

For others who are also looking, it's the Other Sites tab of the Account Settings.

[meridian_rose]

I'll be glad to import comments again when it's fixed, although I know it was LJ's changes that broke it a while back and nothing to do with your side of things. I do almost all my posting here now and x-post to LJ, but I like to import all content back to here to have all my comments in one place :D

Thanks for always keeping us informed and up to date with what's going on.

[pne]

After you've made the changes, would you please post to dw_dev about them?

I backup my LiveJournal with ljbackup, which is affected by the comment change. I'm not sure whether it's still maintained, so I'd probably have to adjust it myself to the new method - seeing what Dreamwidth did will hopefully make that easier!

[denise]

I'll try to remember to get whomever patches it to do so! (The code will also be in the repos, etc.)

[siljamus]

In the last 36 hours you and mark have reminded me why it is that I enjoy this space so much. Thank you for not only being on the ball, but also taking the time to let us know what is going on and what you're doing to fix the problems.

[hellkitty]

I just want to thank you for being communicative with us. It really shows that this site cares when we are kept in the loop. You have all my patience and thanks!

Anyone want to take up a collection to send truffles to the gods of DW?

[kittydesade]

*sacrifices truffles to the gods of DW*

(No, seriously, at this point I will send you a box of truffles if I can find the address to send it to.)

Re: Anyone want to take up a collection to send truffles to the gods of DW?

[denise]

Hee. Well, it probably deserves to go to fu most, so I'll let her decide whether to PM you.

(Of course, she'll probably say it deserves to go to me and Mark...)

[aeon]

This might be an odd thing to say but, as of right now, if you were to change the number of free icons from 15 to 30 or so, closer to InsaneJournal, a lot of people would move here, and pay you their money.

This is a very small window of opportunity to leap on a lot of potential migrants who want to leave LJ but don't see IJ or DW as having something better to offer them.

[aeon]

LJ's roleplay fandom is just falling over itself right now with frustration and you've probably noticed a very large amount of Import queues. You could win out in this situation just by offering those extra icons for free. Even if it was "two week paid trials" like LJ had.

[ktc]

Thank you for keeping us up to date about this! I know there's a lot going on for you guys right now, so I really appreciate that you take the time to keep us in the loop about things and respond so quickly to support requests. :D

[seaivy]

I am very very Non- tech!
I don't understand a great deal of this.
I am grateful to be able to cross post to L J because people who read me are still there. I wish they would come here and be done with it.
I like Dreamwidth because it is clean looking and functions well. I love not having ads!
I've had trouble accessing L J and I've come to feel uncomfortable there.
Thanks for having a nice friendly place!

[denise]

I'm glad you're enjoying it here! And if there's anything you're confused about, please do let me know so I can explain better. (I try to keep things understandable on multiple levels, but sometimes I err on the side of being too technical.)

But basically: crossposting to LJ might be broken right now, because of changes LJ made. We're working on fixing our end of things so it works with the new changes LJ made.

[aerialmelodies]

I've been trying for a day to get my entries only to import and every time it says the process has been aborted. I don't have anything else marked except for journal entries... Is the whole feature down at the moment?

[jumpuphigh]

Every time a ton of people migrate from LJ to Dreamwidth and try to back up their multiple years worth of entries, the importer gets backlogged. I am not staff and cannot say that this is what is happening now but that would be my best guess as to the cause. Give it a few days and retry.

[fannyfae]

As someone who spent the money to buy an LJ permanent account before SUP acquired it, I am getting more and more disenchanted as time goes by. Any word on when DW might be offering permanent accounts here? *hopeful look*

[jumpuphigh]

The last seed account sale happened in April of this year and I don't believe that they plan on having another. However, that sale in April was unexpected so you never know. I wouldn't count on it, though. The business plan indicates that there won't be any additional seed sales. The one in April only happened because of a loss of income in 2010 and a loss of the financial cushion that DW had in the budget due to a religious group trying to shut Dreamwidth down.

[vaxhacker]

So should I assume that the current importer queue backlog is part of this same problem? I thought I had set things to avoid the issues mentioned here, like importing comments, but it's been sitting waiting for login validation since yesterday.

If that's just all part of the same issue with LJ's code changes, I understand, but in case it's in any way a new datapoint worth mentioning, it looks like all imports are stuck, not just the ones with those particular features enabled.

[jumpuphigh]

Every time a ton of people migrate from LJ to Dreamwidth and try to back up their multiple years worth of entries, the importer gets backlogged. I am not staff and cannot say that this is what is happening now but that would be my best guess as to the cause. Give it a few days and retry.

[jenrose]

Livejournal is now not processing line breaks in crossposts correctly. Grump.

[gigglingkat]

I would like to say thank you - once again - for POSTING when there was a problem and have it be the first thing I saw when I clicked "Help/Support"

After the 3rd try, when I KNEW it wasn't a typo - I thought "Is there an issue?" Clicked and found out yes there was.

This sounds so insanely simple but I know it is NOT.

Now how do I find out how to get it to auto post with password? *goes to click something to find out*

ETA: Found it. I go here and click Details next to my LJ account.

Then click the ticky for Save Password.

I love Dreamwidth. That took me how long?

[lireavue]

Here's an interesting glitch, and I'm leaving it here because I suspect it's related to this rather than to the beta update page: I have not received notification in my inbox of the last two entries I crossposted to LJ posting successfully, BUT they have posted and the crosspost link on the DW entry exists. One of these was a post via the old update page, one via the beta update page.

(That said, the one I tried to crosspost with the beta update page didn't crosspost until I hit edit and used the old page, but that falls under known bugs, I believe.)

Um. Not that this is a huge deal for me, I can hit refresh and clearly see where things are and are not posting, but in the event that it provides another data point for you, I hope it's useful!

[fu]

Definitely useful, thanks :)


There's a couple things going on here:

* we changed things with this code push so that you need to opt-in to crosspost success messages, instead of having them all automatically sent to your inbox

* at the same time: there was a bug with crossposting from the beta create entries page; fixed now (sorry about that!)

Importer never seems to work

[sepdet]

I have been trying off and on since August to get my LJ imported, and it always fails.

I keep getting rejected at the username/password validation stage. I've gone to Livejournal, logged in manually by typing out username and password to make sure I'm remembering the latter correctly (i.e. not relying on autofill). Then I come back to DW and attempt to import using that very username and password I just typed, which just worked.

No luck. At one point the icons and user bio came through, but lately it's just been hanging at the login stage.

I am sad. I like DW better, and would prefer to put my money here, but I've got many years of memories I'm afraid of losing, because I don't quite trust LJ.

I thought maybe it was a punctuation mark in my password, but it sounds like others are in the same boat. I keep hoping, sooner or later, it'll work.

Re: Importer never seems to work

[sepdet]

Note: I do have two accounts, my "personal diary" and my "fandom / fanfic" account. The fandom DW is working tickety-boo and is a paid account. I just have a split personality, and apparently LJ is reluctant to give up my other half without a fight. ;)

[vaxhacker]

What's the feeling at this point from the LiveJournal developers? It seemed a little unclear at first whether LJ would be changing things, or maybe that this wasn't, perhaps, the effect they intended (probably wishful thinking there) and might change again.

Are they sounding at all like they may revert or provide backward compatibility, or are they saying, "That's it, deal with the new system."

The sense I get from the chatter I've seen from other client developers is the latter, but before I dive in and start recoding things, I thought I'd check to see if anyone closer to the issue and in touch with LJ devs might know more.

Actually, the big question is whether DW will follow a similar change in handling cookies and logins, or whether I should maintain code to handle the new LJ method and the current DW method for API access?

[denise]

Latest check in lj_dev is that it should be partially fixed with the next update, in that logging in and staying logged in from the protocol will be possible again. That's about all I know!

We haven't had the chance to look over the new LJ methods in depth in terms of evaluating it for possible codemerge yet -- too busy with eighty kajillion other stuff. If we do, though, we'll be sure to post to dw_dev with as much information as possible. We want to start doing a lot more API work, because the protocol is ... dated, but for now, it's not likely the changes will be on the order of "next month, or maybe the month after" type things. We'll keep y'all posted!

[silvara]

when I try to create a new external account (at LJ), the DW says in red font "Failed to connect to http://livejournal.com/interface/xmlrpc."
so i just can't even save my password and login to crosspost from DW to LJ.
is it it, this problem with LJ logins and passwords coding? or is smth else wrong (with my head, with my passwords, with my DW account?)

thanks in advance for your reply! ))

[vaxhacker]

I get this too. I've assumed it's still part of this ongoing issue.

[dk]

Sorry if this was already described, but I found no direct evidence in what is written above.

Recently I tried to configure my DW account to make crossposts to LiveJournal (where I have an account too), and on the "New External Account" page it returned "Failed to connect to http://livejournal.com/interface/xmlrpc." and thus did not set up the crossposting. Is it the same error or maybe I'm doing something incorrectly?

[denise]

Same (or similar) problem! We'll let everybody know when it's fixed.

[mgelius]

trying to import just the entries but nothing. october 9th last entries I have imported.

[denise]

Same problem. We're working on it.

[holyschist]

I have my LJ password saved on DW, but the crossposter is completely failing for me--it's not even giving me a "crosspost failed" message in my DW inbox, just not crossposting to LJ at all. When I go to edit an entry, the crosspost boxes are unchecked.

[denise]

That likely means the crosspost is still in the process of attempting (it will try 5 times, at increasingly spaced-out intervals) because of the current LJ DDoS. Hang tight; sooner or later it will fail (LJ's been completely unreachable from our network for at least the last hour), then wait a day, edit entry, check crosspost box, and it will try again.