Denise (![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png)
denise) wrote in ![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png)
dw_maintenance2022-03-10 04:23 pm
denise) wrote in dw_maintenance2022-03-10 04:23 pm
(no subject)
As part of the current geopolitical crisis caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, rumors are circulating that the Russian government intends to withdraw from the internet so that sites hosted inside Russia won't be accessible from outside Russia. We don't have any information about the credibility of these rumors, and I personally believe it's 50/50 odds at best that it's true, but the rumor has prompted many people from LJ to back up their journals and communities to Dreamwidth, using our content importer, in the interests of preserving access to their data if the rumors are true. Because LiveJournal is hosted inside Russia, if the rumors do turn out to be true, no one outside Russia will be able to reach it, so people are highly motivated to import their stuff right now!
As we've noted in the last few posts, LiveJournal is intermittently blocking our access to their servers, so there's a chance any import attempt might fail. Many imports are successfully finishing today, though, and we're doing everything we can to keep that success percentage high. If yours fails, you'll get a message in your Dreamwidth inbox. If you get any failure message at all, wait 30 minutes and try the import again, starting from the step it failed on.
In order to increase the chance the importer stays unlocked for as long as possible, crossposting is still shut off (there's a whole tl;dr here about why imports are more likely to succeed than crossposting, but I'm typing on my phone so you will be spared my usual earnest explanation). Please also help us reduce the risk of tripping LJ's "automated" blocks by making absolutely 100% certain the LJ password you're entering when you set up the import is the correct password for the LJ account you're importing. All of the import jobs appear to LJ like they come from Dreamwidth, not your computer, and the fewer failed logins LJ sees from us, the less often they block us.
We've temporarily increased the server resources assigned to the importer in hopes of working through the queue more quickly during periods we aren't blocked. For the next several days (or as long as we can) this may cause the site to feel a bit sluggish at times of higher usage: pages may take a tiny bit longer to load and emails may take a few extra minutes to arrive, especially during the US evening hours. (So, from about 8PM in EDT, GMT -5, to about 10PM in PDT, GMT -8.)
We will be carefully monitoring the server load, and we'll throw some more temporary resources at the problem if we need to. Please bear with us for a few days as we try our absolute best to help as many people as possible back up their data just in case!
(Welcome to all our new friends! We're glad you're here. It is usually much, much more chill than this.)
As we've noted in the last few posts, LiveJournal is intermittently blocking our access to their servers, so there's a chance any import attempt might fail. Many imports are successfully finishing today, though, and we're doing everything we can to keep that success percentage high. If yours fails, you'll get a message in your Dreamwidth inbox. If you get any failure message at all, wait 30 minutes and try the import again, starting from the step it failed on.
In order to increase the chance the importer stays unlocked for as long as possible, crossposting is still shut off (there's a whole tl;dr here about why imports are more likely to succeed than crossposting, but I'm typing on my phone so you will be spared my usual earnest explanation). Please also help us reduce the risk of tripping LJ's "automated" blocks by making absolutely 100% certain the LJ password you're entering when you set up the import is the correct password for the LJ account you're importing. All of the import jobs appear to LJ like they come from Dreamwidth, not your computer, and the fewer failed logins LJ sees from us, the less often they block us.
We've temporarily increased the server resources assigned to the importer in hopes of working through the queue more quickly during periods we aren't blocked. For the next several days (or as long as we can) this may cause the site to feel a bit sluggish at times of higher usage: pages may take a tiny bit longer to load and emails may take a few extra minutes to arrive, especially during the US evening hours. (So, from about 8PM in EDT, GMT -5, to about 10PM in PDT, GMT -8.)
We will be carefully monitoring the server load, and we'll throw some more temporary resources at the problem if we need to. Please bear with us for a few days as we try our absolute best to help as many people as possible back up their data just in case!
(Welcome to all our new friends! We're glad you're here. It is usually much, much more chill than this.)
Migration tips: friends vs. circles/filters
I recall from one of the previous Great Migrations that this was one of the trickiest things for new arrivals to absorb, so here's a slightly edited capsule summary of a guide I recently wrote for a newly arrived friend-from-LJ:
//
DW doesn't do "friends" as such; rather, it divides the functions of the LJ "friends list" into several clusters.
The Circles and Circle Management tools are for organizing what you've subscribed to, and control the top-level "grant access" function that is the DW equivalent of actually "friending" someone else. The Reading Page is the broad equivalent of the LJ Friends page, and consists by default of all journals (& communities) to which you're subscribed. Subscribing to a journal adds that journal to your Reading Page, but doesn't in itself affect anything the owner of that journal sees.
Filters are a separate thing, and exist in two flavors: subscription filters, which are designed to organize what you see of other people's journals (and comms, etc.) and access filters, which are DW's hyper-advanced version of the "friends locking" features on LJ.
Subscription filters let you subdivide your Reading Page, and thus are a viewing tool but not an access tool. Early on, for instance, I created subscription filters on my journal for "All Except Stockings" and "Stockings Only", so that while the Fandom Stocking challenge was running, I could switch to the "All But Stockings" filter to see my usual feed, and then the "Stockings Only" filter to see everyone's stockings and the attendant requests.
Access filters are LJ's "friends-lock" feature on steroids. "Grant access" at the circle level lets the recipient open your journal's front door and get into the house; access filters further organize and customize what the user with access can see. I've seen them used both as a subject-matter organizer and a privacy tool. In the first instance, someone may have filters for cosplay, singing, cooking, fanfic, and beer-brewing, and will mention all these on their journal so that friends can opt into the filters they're interested in. (When I say "opt in", it means "ask to be let in"; you keep hold of the keys to access filters, and only you can let people into and out of filters you create.) In the second, some users set up filters to lock down viewing some or all of their RL-related posts to a limited set of folks. One might also create a filter specifically for geographically adjacent readers, for fellow workers at one's place(s) of employment, or even one just for family members if one had several such who were also DW subscribers).