Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

I am posting this because I want a record of it and this is the easiest place. I made probably a dozen attempts to cancel LJ automatic payments since they changed the ToS to something that exists only in Russian but puts everyone under Russian law. Every time, I got an error message, even when I was able to log in to LJ for other purposes.

I just got an email that an automatic payment had gone through. I suspect I will be taking this to my credit card's dispute department, but I am trying writing to LiveJournal again. The current state of affairs is that I can log in and see a history of payments, but when I try to change automatic payments, the error message is "cannot load cart."

This is the message I just sent using their internal messaging system:

I have been trying to cancel automatic payments for the past two weeks. Every time I try, I get an error message, either that LJ is undergoing "scheduled maintenance" or that for some other reason it cannot load the payment area.

This morning I got email that an automatic payment had been made. I want that payment cancelled--the only reason it went through is that I have been unable to load the payment area, despite being logged in to LiveJournal.

I just tried to go to the payment area to cancel future payments, and again got "cannot load cart."

I am asking you both to reverse today's automatic payment of $14.16 and to cancel future automatic payments.

Thank you.

Vicki Rosenzweig

[eom]

When I sent this, the acknowledgment included a reminder that support is run mostly by volunteers, which in this case is not encouraging. I've been a support volunteer, and hope they're still directing payments questions to someone who has authority, rather than just saying "sorry, FAQ xyz says they're not reversible."

ETA: good outcome, see followup post.

I have removed almost all of the permissions I had set up between Dreamwidth and LJ, out of caution and because I don't think many of them were being used.

This won't stop anyone from reading public entries, or using OpenID to comment. If you are on LJ and not DW, and have been using that access, or want to going forward, let me know. (At least for now, I am more comfortable doing the cross-platform sharing with people who say they're actually reading, than with those who haven't posted or commented to LJ in years.)

I know a bunch of people who are deleting their LiveJournal accounts because they're worried about the servers now being in Russia. One of them noted that they didn't want their private data being available for Putin's use.

That strikes me as a good reason not to put anything private on LJ from now on, but what's there is there. I commented:

Don't count on SUP to actually overwrite or otherwise get rid of the data if you delete a journal. Keeping the files while claiming they were gone wouldn't even be technically difficult: the software is already supposed to keep the contents of deleted journals for 30 days in case you change your mind. My inexpert hunch is that deleting an individual entry, or editing it to replace your private content with quotes from Shakespeare or Alice in Wonderland or the first umpteen digits of pi is more likely to actually get rid of the data.

LJ friends, I haven't been intentionally ignoring you: I've been trying to crosspost from Dreamwidth and not noticed that it wasn't working because I hadn't told DW I updated my LJ password. I'm poking at most (not all) of the last couple of months of entries to see if that will make them crosspost this time.

I don't know whether this is going to produce a flood of apparently new posts, or if it'll all be tucked away because they're flagged as from weeks ago.

They will be removing the misfeature that allowed cross-posting of comments to locked posts.

If you're concerned about this for your own privacy, note that this is a planned future/next release thing, so it may take a fortnight. They are not simply rolling back the release that had this problem.

So, credit where it's due, but once again, the problematic thing was dropped in with no warning, and the fix is still in the future tense.

I recently posted something using an access filter, and got email from someone who noticed that he could see it on LJ but not on DW. If you think I may have left you out of filters on one site, please let me know.

Most obviously, that's if you can see cross-posted things on one site but not the other. Also, if you joined Dreamwidth relatively recently, I may not have put you in the right Dreamwidth filters because I imported LJ entries, and filters, several months ago. Let me know if you think I should check. There are filters I don't use very often, so it might not be obvious if they aren't matched. Don't assume I'll be cross-posting everything, or forever.