LiveJournal Major Notes: Notifications, Charitable vgifts, Valentines vgifts

[news]

We want to thank you for providing so much constructive feedback in response to last week's State of the Goat newsletter. We intend to honor our end of the social contract by being more transparent and responsive going forward. As you know, bugs are inevitable. Spam attacks happen. Bills must be paid. Sadly, we cannot survive on love alone (though we won't give up trying). That said, we'll strive to keep ads to a reasonable level, while working hard to bring you the features you want.
LiveJournal cares!

• Thanks for the suggestion! We just added a new charitable vgift (priced at $2.99) to help raise funds for emergency relief efforts in Haiti. We'll donate 100 percent of the money we raise to UNICEF and CARE.
• We've also added a charitable vgift to show our love for our furry friends. Priced at $2.99, we'll contribute 100 percent of gross proceeds to the World Society for the Protection of Animals!
• We raised a total of $517.27 from the sale of our virtual red ribbon for IAVI.org (the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative). We want to thank everyone who participated! BTW, we'll keep the red ribbon for sale in the gift shop, so you can continue to help fund research for an AIDS vaccine.
• We'd like to give a very warm shout out to Help_Haiti, a new community formed in response to the devastating earthquake in Haiti. They're currently hosting a variety of auctions to raise funds. Whether you'd like to donate or bid on baked goods, graphics, or fanfiction, it's a great way to make a difference and meet new friends. Hey, we just read in the comments that ontd_startrek is also raising money for UNICEF in Haiti. They've already reached $2,500! minionstimulus is also supporting UNICEF here. They've raised more than $13,000 from Supernatural fans! If you know about any other LiveJournal communities that are mobilizing relief efforts for Haiti, feel free to post about them below. Thanks for your wonderful suggestion. We'll be adding a charitable vgift to support Haiti relief shortly. Stay posted.

Stuff you should know

• Paid and Permanent users can still send out their $10 holiday coupons to Basic/Plus users through Friday, January 15th, midnight, PST. Coupons can be redeemed to upgrade to an annual paid account through January 31st at midnight, PST.
• Good news: We removed the error message that displayed in the LiveJournal banner when you click on the Scrapbook menu.
• We have two issues that may be interfering with your timely receipt of notifications:
1. We understand that some of you are not getting notifications on comment threads you're tracking, even though they're listed as active in your account settings. Our Engineering and Ops teams are examining all the possible reasons this is happening. We'll keep you posted.
2. If you use an AOL email address, your notifications may have hit AOL's spam filters. We're working with (i.e., on) AOL to get this resolved. In the interim, if you change to a non-AOL email address, you should start getting notifications again going forward. This will not impact past notifications, however. Read this FAQ to learn how to change your email notification address.
• At this point, holiday decorations make us pretty sick too. We'll kill the holiday banner on January 15th.
• We're still working on the 60-second cut-off for international voice posting. We've tried a number of different potential solutions. Our Ops team hopes to get this working correctly very soon!
• As you know, we'll be running various, infrequent video ads to logged out and Basic/Plus users. Despite our efforts to disable audio, some of these ads may auto-play sound. (And, yes, this has taught us a valuable lesson: never say never.) We'll continue to do our best to balance your LiveJournal experience with Frank's bottom line.
• Just an early heads up, we'll be taking down the site for a few hours on Friday or Saturday, January 22nd or 23rd (depending on where you're located), to do some important backend maintenance. For details, please read this entry in lj_maintenance.

If you want to read more, meet us under the cut!
Featured photo

Congratulations to msserv who won our sixth LJ_photophile weekly poll. Click here to vote for next week's photo of the week!



Guess what?!




We're excited (and maybe a touch scared) to open a Pandora's box of commenting, but if you're among the first 25 users to post your guess on what's in the mystery box in the comments below (hey, there are no wrong answers here), we'll send you a Valentines vgift! This box will *magically* open on February 14th to reveal the hidden surprise (*guaranteed voodoo-free)! For more Valentines mystery boxes, visit the gift shop.

Thanks, again, for reading. We'll see you next week.