The importer is still running, we swear! It's just very busy.

[denise]

People who are worried because the import of their LiveJournal account has been running for a long time with no real signs of progress: please don't be concerned! The import queue is currently a little long. (In the same way that Mt Everest is a little tall and the Mariana Trench is a little deep.) We're limited in how many import jobs we can run simultaneously and how quickly we can start the next import after one finishes: LiveJournal, like all sites, has restrictions on how frequently we can programmatically request data from their site, so the import queue can get very backed up at times like this when more imports are being started than are finishing. If you look at the import queue and the numbers don't seem to be changing much, or are only going up, it doesn't mean that no imports are finishing: it means a lot of additional people have scheduled an import since the last time you reloaded.

As long as you haven't gotten a failure message in your on-site inbox, your import is still running. (Even if you have gotten a failure message, your import may still be running: if the site thinks that the failure is something that might correct itself, like being unable to connect to the remote site, it will retry for a few times before giving up.) If you have gotten a failure message, the error message in your inbox should tell you what went wrong.

The three common problems right now: 1) you mistyped your username and/or password; 2) you need to agree to LiveJournal's new ToS before they'll permit you to access the data in your account; 3) an entry or entries in your LiveJournal account have a text encoding mismatch and you need to follow the link in the error message to fix it on LJ.

If you haven't gotten a failure message, your import is still waiting in the queue, and will run when it makes its way up to the top of the queue.

People keep asking us how long the queue is (by which they mean, how much time will it take for a job just started to successfully finish: length of time, not number of jobs waiting). I would love to be able to give you a definite answer! It's really, really hard for us to predict how long it will take for a job to get up to the top of the queue, though: how long an import takes to complete depends on a lot of things, including how many posts/comments are in the journal. To give you a ballpark figure that might be off by up to 100% on either side: If I personally started a brand new import right now (in my timezone, the early morning of Monday 10 Apr), I would be pleasantly surprised if it finished before Tuesday morning (24 hours or so), would expect it to finish sometime on Tuesday night or maybe even stretch all the way to Wednesday night (36-60 hours), and wouldn't start to wonder if I should poke mark or alierak to doublecheck that something hadn't gotten stuck in such a way that our monitoring didn't alert us about it until Thursday afternoon or evening (100+ hours).

All of those time estimates, by the way, assume a relatively uncomplicated job that succeeds on the first try. When the site tries again after a failure, it includes a delay that increases after each failure in case the failure was due to transient network issues. So, I know some of you started an import at the end of last week and it's still running: some of you are trying to import very large journals, and some of you ran into errors along the way and are in a retry wait loop. Again: if you haven't gotten the final error message in your inbox (and it will tell you it's the final error), it's still chugging along.

You do not have to leave the importer page open or stay logged into Dreamwidth until your import finishes. (You do have to avoid changing your LJ password until the job is done, or it will fail.) You can close the window/tab and go off and explore Dreamwidth; the movers will be along in a little while with your stuff.

The tl;dr version of my usual longwinded babble: IMPORTER VERY BUSY. MANY PEOPLE MOVING IN. LIKE ON DORM OR APARTMENT MOVE-IN DAY, FREIGHT ELEVATORS VERY SLOW. BUILDING OWNERS RUNNING FREIGHT ELEVATORS AS FAST AS POSSIBLE AND APOLOGIZE FOR THE WAIT.

A housewarming glass of champagne/sparkling cider/fancy handmade soda for all! Welcome to the neighborhood.

EDIT, 10 Apr 2017 7:15PM EDT: the importer is not the only thing that is very busy today! I'm trying to get to all the comments here, but keep getting dragged off to handle other stuff (and will be knocking off for the night soon). If you have a technical support problem, it will probably be faster to open a support request, where there's less likelihood that it will get overlooked in the sea of comments.

Comments

[moth2fic]

My gmail folder where I store my account info tells me I've been on DW since 2010 and for most of that time (apart from the first year) I've been a paid member. Really, really impressed with the management - both their efficiency and their approach.

I had, or thought I had, a permanent (paid) account with LJ though I only ever cross post to it and use Scrapbook for hosting pics. But that hostage taking of my account seems illegal to me, as it clearly does to others, whether under US law, Russian, or any other. Still, I suppose people can't risk arguing or they could lose the lot.

Don't worry about being slow. We all understand. Most of us have friends and can explain to them if they're worried.

I'm excited about so many friends finally moving here. We need some kind of site-wide celebration in the near future!!

[mewsing]

After being on LJ since December 2002, it felt weird to finally lower the boom and delete it entirely. But that new TOS? No. Just no.

So glad to have made a DW account when I did; thank you SO MUCH for the service to import our content!!

xoxo

[denise]

Thank you for helping to subsidize the site for people who can't afford paid time!

[denise]

Fortunately, we have a lot of experience in this sort of thing! mark and I realized a few weeks ago that if you count the time we were working on LJ, we've both been doing this for like over fifteen years each. Like, not "working in the tech industry" sort of "doing this for fifteen years"; I mean, I started working on LJ at the tail end of 2001 as a volunteer (and got hired at the end of 2002), and, barring like one eight-month period where I was hiding under the bed drinking heavily after I quit LJ in 2007 and before we got the idea for DW and start working on it in 2008, I've been working on this thing ever since. (Mark was 2002-2006 and 2008-now; he thought he'd escaped until I messaged him with "So, I have this ludicrous idea...".)

While this fact inevitably makes me feel dreadfully old, it also means that pretty much no matter what happens, we've been through it at least once before. :)

[saki101]

My journal is also newly imported. It took three days all told and the screen that showed the status of different elements of the import was very reassuring as the process progressed. It was easy to figure out that an awful lot of people were importing whole journals and communities at the same time, but it's especially nice to hear more of the details, such as the limits LJ sets in accessing. Thank you for creating DW and handling this massive influx.

[denise]

Yup, fear not, once you schedule an import, it WILL get handled! ...eventually. :)

[weaverbird]

Thanks for all the hard work and for keeping us updated on progress!

I decided on Saturday to bring my old LJ over here for safekeeping (the entries are done, comments now in queue yay!) and had to laugh when I saw the length of said queues. Good grief, what an exodus! The housewarming party is going to be ginormous! *begins stockpiling munchies*

[mourningdove333]

Thank you for letting us know! My journal entries are currently in the process of being imported from LJ. Is it possible to "subscribe" to journals that are on LiveJournal and to "grant access" to LJ friends through Dreamwidth? I tried to do this with several of my friends but haven't seen their journal entries on my "Reading" page here yet.

[stageira]

I actually feel guilty over this! I had my import done early on, but then I decided to check my old old old entries and I realized that everything was a triplicate *headesk* That was a lot of entries to fix, so I deleted everything and started a new import??? Ops?

Virtual chocolate and cafeine to all!!!

[notabler]

Thank you very much for your hard work

[denise]

*salutes you back with the 2L bottle of cherry coke zero I am subsisting on*

And thank you for supporting us! We will never be as slick or as fast-developing or as fancy as some sites out there that subsist off venture capital, but for a couple of people who can best be described as "fluffy idealists" sometimes, it's been really wonderful over the past 8 years (oh god eight years) to see that our idealism wasn't unfounded after all and it really is possible to do this without conforming to the standard startup model.

[chezmax]

Holy wow. This makes me excited to be here. The loss of a permanent account hurts though.

[monanotlisa]

<3

[pritkiy_kaban]

Thanks for update, and for keeping DW afloat.

Guess I should apologize on behalf of LJ crowd of fellow Russians. We did not mean to jump the boat that hard!

[bytebuster]

Denise, thank you for your hard work on this! Indeed, there's one more wave of Exodus from LJ; many Ukrainians recently flee from there.

And your update and warm welcome is very important for them.

[denise]

There are sooooo many bad jokes I can make here, but pretty much all of them fall into the category of Things Denise Should Not Say In Public Because She's Usually Not As Funny As She Thinks She Is And The Failure Mode Of Clever Is Asshole...

Seriously, though, we're thriled to have all y'all who are moving in this week, whether as a "I'm just gonna use my DW account to back up the contents of my LJ account in the event of future disaster" all the way along the spectrum to to I AM THELMA AND LOUISE'ING MY LIVEJOURNAL STRAIGHT OFF THE CLIFF, SEE YOU ON DW ONCE THE DEBRIS CLEARS. I hope that people who are used to the LJ way of doing things can adapt to the DW style over time! (Said style basically being "slower development, sustainable business practice, and run by Real People who occasionally have trouble remembering where they left their pants".)

[rmc28]

You can subscribe to the feeds from LiveJournal accounts and have them appear in your Reading page, but I think that will be public entries only.

When you import your LJ friends, they are given an OpenID to which you can grant access. In addition, if they also have a Dreamwidth account, they can claim their generated OpenID and link it to their Dreamwidth identity (if they want).

More information here: where to find LiveJournal feeds: http://www.livejournal.com/support/faq/149.html

All about subscribing to feeds, OpenIDs, etc
https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faqbrowse?faqcat=othersites

[rydra_wong]

*brings "Welcome To The Neighbourhood" cake for the new arrivals*

[denise]

Data points are useful, thank you!

[sharpiefan]

Bearing in mind it's been nearly a year since I've been able to afford paid time, and it's only six months' worth. DW is something I do feel I want to support, too.

Also, I missed having my full range of icons. ;)

[enchanted_manit]

Nothing has described how I left LJ like "I AM THELMA AND LOUISE'ING MY LIVEJOURNAL STRAIGHT OFF THE CLIFF, SEE YOU ON DW ONCE THE DEBRIS CLEARS."

[crantz]

Yeah, my lj permanent account paid itself off over ten years ago but it's still a bit sad. I remember putting the check addressed to LJ in the mail when I was a teen still.

[sharpiefan]

DW: Like LJ used to be in the good ol' days, minus lot of fandom who jumped to Tumblr, dang it all.

[crantz]

I'll put up the patio lanterns.

[denise]

I hear ya. I mean, even though I'm glad DW exists (and would be even if I weren't a co-owner) for people to move to, I'm still tremendously sad to watch LJ's long slow meltdown. I put a lot of my life into it...