Livejournal Issues and more

[urbpan]

I'm having some weird issues with livejournal today and lately. This morning it wouldn't load on my computer, it would act like it was loading and stall forever, on both firefox and safari. I expected today to be another great blackout day with lots of angry posts by paid members, but I haven't seen a thing.

I have noticed some people complaining about being friended by mysterious accounts, and I've noticed it on my account as well. The accounts seem like real lj members, but have no friends or communities in common with the friended party. I don't really care--it's not like friending me allows access to my friends only posts or anything--but some people are pretty freaked out.

Today I found three friending notifications in my email, from three alphabetically adjacent accounts: abustellae, acegaal, and accosovay. They list 280, 265, and 280 friends each, they all have one another as friends, and they have four friends in common with me--all cartoonists. I haven't looked at their journals yet, and it could be innocent, or a coincidence, but it seems pretty weird. If you guys are real, say hello and tell me why you friended me please!

In other news, it's over 60 degrees in Boston and I want to hang out outside all day! I've got a little outside work to do later on today, but I spent the morning in a too-hot surgery room. I have a bunch of lies I want to tell about New Hampshire, but it will have to wait until this afternoon.

Comments

[cottonmanifesto.livejournal.com]

i've read a few posts about lj being annoying and slow to load.

it is GORGEOUS out. i just spent the past 2hrs outside and it was fannnnnntastic.

[jilder.livejournal.com]

It's been hovering around the thirties (celcius) in my neck of the woods, with painfully high humidity and frequent afternoon storms. I've been sweaty for about a week now - one showers, and one is sweaty again before one manages to get dresses.

In other news, LJ has been free and easy with the ban hammer in one of my comms. People getting banninated at random! Very weird.

[smallerdemon.livejournal.com]

I too have had some of those odd befriendings that do not seem related to anything I can easily discern, and it does bug me somewhat that it might easily be accounts that are sucking friends post and reposting them as content elsewhere. Nearly all of my post lately have been very strict friends only except for topics so drenched in the media that even if my posts are getting friend sucked to other sites that it would get lost in the morass.

My guess is that there are LJ accounts that are friending things they want to use as content post in third party blogs by making one account, friending it, then pulling that post via RSS to something that autoposts to some blog in some faraway land and then ads are dumped to that blog. The person makes a blog with content and ads and never has to actually WRITE a blog, but just pull contents from any public posts. It does make sense, too, to make ONE account and associate THAT account with ONE LJ friend, then you can just keep a database of LJ accounts that equal particular topics that the unsuspecting friended user post about. In your case, I suspect that most of your public posts are about nature related things, and my guess is that all of your old 365 days in urban species are all open to the public. I wouldn't understand, though, why they wouldn't just suck that content out via RSS anyway, except that they may have some technical reason or some reason that doing it that particular way makes them less likely to get caught.

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

Okay, that just bugs me.

[uneko.livejournal.com]

My gut says they are not real.

None of them have any posts (public).
They are all using the same theme, but with a different color scheme
They all have. well.. I didn't compare closely, but I looked from U to Z in their friends lists, and it tends to be about identical.

They have no real profile information except a birthdate.
They all have one user picture, named 'default'.
All three userpics are.. similar. Semi-abstract, without really betraying any opinion or ias about anything. just "pretty".

[yogurtkiller.livejournal.com]

I've been lurking for a while and don't think I ever introduced myself... I was trying to identify some fungus in my yard and google popped up one of your 365 urban species entries. You seemed to be consistently interesting so I friended you. :)

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

Thanks! Pleased to meet you!