Well we really screwed this one up…

[news]

For reasons we are still trying to figure out what was supposed to be a well planned attempt to clean up a few journals that were violating LiveJournal's policies that protect minors turned into a total mess. I can only say I’m sorry, explain what we did wrong and what we are doing to correct these problems and explain what we were trying to do but

Comments

[st_salieri]

Well, that's very pretty language.

That probably took, what, twenty minutes to type up? Is there any reason why you couldn't have posted something earlier today? Even a generic, "Don't worry, we're looking into this and will get back to you as soon as possible," would have been much appreciated.

Mistakes happen. Most people here understand that. What we don't understand is why you and your employees had the time to run all over the place to various online and media outlets to try to explain and justify yourselves, but at the same time couldn't bother to post something to the thousands of users who have registered concern over these actions.

Your lack of basic respect for your users is what we'll have to get past in order for you to "regain trust". Sorry. This was an incredibly boneheaded move on your part.

[je_regret_riens]

♥

[barakb25]

OK, but it would be an overstatement to say that everyone ran all over the web making comments. I talked to one reporter on the phone during a break at a meeting I was at and Anil posted on MetaFilter. Could we have been faster, yes. Should we have been faster, yes. Was talking to the press the problem, no. It just took too long to figure out what had happened. At first I thought that only clear violators were taken down. It took a while to find out that was not totally true and that further people were not communicated to and told how to fix problems.

Miscommunications are hard to figure out.

[hoshi3]

Looking into reported journals and taking a few minutes to an hour to do so is easy.

[hinoryu]

Sir, 'all over the web' is hardly an overstatement. I heard about this in an IRC channel completely unrelated to LJ about five minutes after the shit went down. It's been all over the web if you look at the right places. Hell, even Wikipedia has it on there.

Tell me again how that's 'overstatement'?

[st_salieri]

Thank you for your response. I'm sure this has been a frustrating day for your team.

Miscommunication is one thing. Total lack of communication is something else. From your perspective, it may seem like talking to one reporter and making one post on MetaFilter wasn't a big deal. But it was a big deal for us, because we were hearing nothing from you. We were left to piece together rumors from various sources, trying to figure out what was going on.

Your users should have been your first priority. As I said, even a placeholder post on this community would have been better than nothing. We shouldn't have had to go to CNET or MetaFilter to find out the basics of what was going on.

[scarlettgirl]

Or, worse yet, the stupid vigilante site that had time to talk about the incident in detail.

[anglicwitch]

agreed.

[nuitari4pwnage]

I heard that those guys have viruses on their site.

[anglicwitch]

STOP IT, JUST SAY THAT WE ARE RIGHT, YOU SHOULD'VE HAD SOMEONE TELL US THAT YOU GUYS WERE WORKING ON IT.

and stop being pompous, i feel like i'm being ridiculed. YOU're (not the rest of the LJ crew) not apologizing because you mean it, you're apologizing because more than 5000 comments had been made about no one talking to us. And because we've contacted ACLU.

AND ANSWER THE QUESTIONS WITH REAL ANWERS.

thank you.

[anglicwitch]

answer*