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

[yurikhan]

So, what, has LiveJournal taken their remaining users’ data hostage? Is that even legal? (J/K, pretty sure it’s covered by the old ToS.)

[brickhousewench]

Many APIs throttle how many connections can be made at one time, it's to protect servers and keep the server load somewhat consistent to avoid problems.

In non-tech terms, basically there are only so many exit doors to the LJ building, and we're bunched up waiting for our turn to get to a door.

[yurikhan]

Throttling I can understand, that’s just self-preservation. I was reacting to this:

The three common problems right now: […] 2) you need to agree to LiveJournal's new ToS before they'll permit you to access the data in your account; […]

Requiring to agree to the new ToS before releasing the data for migration — if that is true — when said ToS *is* the actual reason people are migrating — is actively evil.

[denise]

To be scrupulously fair because that's how I try to roll, it doesn't necessarily have to be actively evil, just the law of unintended consequence. The way LJ (and DW, since we're a code fork of LJ) is programmed, the best way to keep someone from posting or commenting while logged in until they agree to a new version of the ToS just so happens to also fire when you're using the XML-RPC protocol to download journal contents, and DW's importer uses the XML-RPC protocol. That "you can't do anything until you agree to the new ToS version" was actually added ages ago. (I want to say ...2005? 2006? Something like that. While I was still working for LJ and it was still owned by Six Apart, at least.) So, it's possible the current team went to go build a ToS check, realized there was support for doing one already in the code, and enabled it, without specifically realizing/actively deciding that it would also block people from accessing their data through the XML-RPC protocol.

Mind you, I don't know for sure one way or the other! I just like to point out when the fail is possibly accidental instead of having to automatically be malicious. :)

[yurikhan]

Okay. Hanlon’s Razor strikes again.

[denise]

I mean, I've been working with (some variety of) this codebase for like 16 years now. I KNOW HOW HARD IT IS TO FEEL CONFIDENT YOU ADEQUATELY UNDERSTAND ALL THE DETAILS OF WHAT WILL HAPPEN IF YOU CHANGE THAT ONE LINE. It's eighteen years' worth of legacy Perl! Sometimes I think it's a wonder it still works at all.

(This is why occasionally, we will do a code push, and five minutes later, we will make another code push consisting only of the emergency commit that has a commit message of just "lol oops" or similar...)

[yurikhan]

I actually must confess I have never had to proof my code against a malicious future owner. From a Lawful Neutral standpoint, not allowing any API operations to a non-ToS-consenting user is perfectly normal. It takes an actual safety-related designer to provide a fire escape.

[denise]

There are pretty much only so many threat models you can design for at once...

[elialshadowpine]

"It's eighteen years' worth of legacy Perl!"

*eyetwitches*

[denise]

I SEE YOU PROPERLY UNDERSTAND MY PAIN

[my_tucker]

I'd love to give LJ the benefit of the doubt on that one Denise, except apparently when the code update first went live (the one that made the TOS appear immediately after login), you could ignore the pop up and delete your account by going directly to the account page and change the account status there. That loophole got closed quite quickly though, so.....

Also if you look at their support board, their volunteers are now giving a canned response to people asking if LJ will delete their accounts since they can't do so without accepting the TOS. They are replying that LJ cannot delete an account, only the logged in user can. They must think people came down in the last shower. :/ I feel for the volunteers because they are only the messengers, but are getting some pretty angry replies.

[brickhousewench]

Oh heck yeah, not arguing with that. I was NOT happy when I clicked the "not now" button on the TOS and LiveJournal tried to log me out. =(

[dragoness_e]

So what are they going to do if you violate their TOS six ways from Sunday? Kick you off the service? I mean, you've already left by that point.

I'm a U.S. citizen who grew up during the Cold War, and Putin is an ex-KGB goon turned dictator. I wouldn't actually feel bad about breaking Russian laws regarding blogging or political speech or "pornography". Anyone got some NSFW Putin/Trump slash art we can cross-post to LJ as a "going-away present" once the transfers are done?

[my_tucker]

So, what, has LiveJournal taken their remaining users’ data hostage? Is that even legal? (J/K, pretty sure it’s covered by the old ToS.)

I know you're meaning in terms of allowing the importer, but actually LJ has taken hostage of people's data in the sense that you cannot edit or delete entries, or even delete your LJ account UNLESS you accept the new TOS. At the very least it would have been decent of them to have an option to allow people to delete their accounts without accepting the agreement if use of the site was contingent on that.

[soc_puppet]

I mean, there was a loophole where you could delete by going directly to the account status page, but that got closed pretty quick.

I also heard that it's possible to delete your account without agreeing to the new TOS if you turn Javascript off, but I haven't tried it. Mostly because I couldn't be bothered to look up how ^^a

But yes, those were both by accident rather than benevolence on LJ's part.

[dragoness_e]

More and more, I like the idea of "agree to new TOS, delete all but one last post, post XXX photoshopped Trump/Putin slash."

[cielmelodies]

I'll be honest - I write slash fics, and if not for the fact that I have no idea what they're going to do with user privacy if I continue to post slash, I wouldn't mind leaving all my posts on my LJ so that whoever opens it and decides that it has to be purged, likely had to read my fics and being embarrassed about it. /Shrug/ LOL
Although someone yes photoshop and do it.