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

[jadesymb]

Thank you! the update is appreciated!

I would also be interested in a perm account! I had one on LJ.....

[sporky_rat]

Greetings! I responded to a comment above yours about Seed accounts, but I'll also respond here.

This is the write up that denise did on why Seed accounts aren't going to be regularly offered. A paid account (or a premium paid) are extremely useful because they're continually supporting the site.

[moth2fic]

I remember that write up and thought it was all very sensible. But - and maybe this is a stupid question/point - the reason I liked having a permanent account on LJ wasn't the cost angle, it was so that I didn't have to be online and available when the time for renewal came round. I travel a lot and sometimes have erratic access to both social media and my bank/cards. Maybe you could consider setting up an automatic renewal option? Or is there one already and I'm just blind?

[sharpiefan]

I don't know if there's an auto-renewal option, but speaking as one who's had (and has just bought) a paid account, they email you twice before the account reverts to free, to let you know that that account is about to revert, and if you renew then, the new paid time starts from the end of your previous paid time (so you don't end up losing two weeks). And if you can't renew then, when you can renew, your icons etc will all be available from when the payment goes through - in other words, you lose access to icons during the time an account's free but those icons aren't deleted, and will still show in posts. They just won't show up in the drop-down selection box, which will only keep the 15 most used icons from before the account reverted to free.

I hope all that made sense - the fact that I know what I mean doesn't mean it's intelligible. I think I may need coffee.

[moth2fic]

Thank you! I think you've answered my main concerns. Obviously if I'm afk I'm not using my account or my icons. I am sometimes afk for over a month so could easily miss reminders or get them late. And yes, I was concerned I'd lose my icons, or even my account! Yes, I know there are free accounts but had no idea I'd just be transferred to one rather than being deleted!!!

[denise]

Yes, don't worry about it! If your paid time expires and you're not around to renew it, everything in your account will still be safe -- we never delete an account or its contents just because its paid time expired or because it looks like someone might not be using it anymore. (There are people who created an account back in 2009 when we first opened, ignored it for the next eight years, and came back last week to start using it!) One of the things we specifically think about when we're designing things or making decisions is what we used to call the "Peace Corps test" -- there was a LJ support volunteer who joined the Peace Corps and dropped off the face of the internet for two years because at the time the place she was stationed didn't have reliable internet access, but she absolutely intended to come back and start using her journal again after her tour. So any time we start thinking about account access and paid time expiration and the like, we ask ourselves: if we did this, would Christine have come home to find her journal was still there or not?

[moth2fic]

That attitude/philosophy is one of the things I love about this place! Thanks for the reassurances!

[sporky_rat]

I don't think there's an automatic renewal option - but that does sound like a fantastic idea for Suggestions. Suggestions go here. Then they get to the dw_suggestions page and voted on.

[moth2fic]

Went there, did that, thanks! :)

[denise]

Ack, I'm sorry I didn't catch this in time to save you the trouble of writing up the suggestion -- I explained to you why I didn't let the entry out of the moderation queue, but in case anybody reading these comments in passing is curious, lemme copy the message here:

Automatic renewal is something our payment processor does support, and we'd like to offer it as an option for people in the future: it's good for users like you who don't want their account to expire if they can't access the internet for a little while or who just don't want to worry about remembering to renew, and it's good for us because it means we can make more reliable predictions about future income. We just haven't had the time to figure out how we should present it to people and then do the programming yet: we want our version of automatic renewal to be helpful and convenient, but not charge people's credit cards when they aren't expecting it or wind up with people enrolling in automatic renewal without intending to.

I was also still working for LJ at the point where they introduced automatic renewal, and it caused a *lot* of support requests with people needing help to straighten out their billing because they'd done something they hadn't intended to. There's a certain amount of that we could prevent by being very careful with designing the workflows, but no matter what, introducing automatic renewal would increase the number of people who needed help. We're a really tiny company, so we have to plan carefully whenever we do anything that might increase our support volume.

None of these are problems that can't be solved! And it is on the list. We just haven't had the time to do it yet, and it's a harder thing to design than is immediately obvious.

[denise]

You and your helpful cheerful comment replies are totally my patronus today, I'll have you know. <3 Thank you!

[sporky_rat]

You're welcome!

(You can assign goodness to jjhunter for giving me what to live up to - and I married a Hufflepuff. It's rubbed off.)

[denise]

Oh yes, I remember that poem! I love what JJ can do with language so much, especially with strict forms.

[sporky_rat]

JJ is the Wayland Smith of word crafting.

[denise]

And in addition to the links sporky_rat gave you, I went into a bit more detail about seed accounts in a reply to the previous thread that you might be interested in!