tenlittlebullets | Open call to anyone still listening

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Open call to anyone still listening - archiving old LJ comms

If you modded LiveJournal communities back in the day, please consider archiving them to Dreamwidth NOW. So much 2000s internet history lives there, and if LJ falls off the internet (as it very well might, depending on how things go in Russia in the near future), links will break and vast amounts of it will be lost. Wayback Machine only captures public posts; a Dreamwidth import can pull in locked posts and comments, and allow people to view them by joining the comm.

If you don't want to go to the hassle yourself, I will happily do it for you - just DM

tenlittlebullets on DW and temporarily add

10littlebullets on LJ as a community mod. I can do it under this account, a catchall archivist account, or a specific one created just for the comm. If you want the Dreamwidth version to be co-maintained or transferred to your DW account, I can also do that.

If Dreamwidth's importer locks up, as it might if there's an archiving stampede, this Tumblr post (+reblogged mirror just in case) has instructions for exporting comments in XML format. LJ still has a built-in page that lets you do the same for posts. Dreamwidth won't let you import from these XML files, but they're still human-readable and can probably be imported to Wordpress if you want to host an archive later.

(Pre-emptive permission: Feel free to link, copy, repost, and spread this post wherever you want. Also feel free to translate it into any language you want. I would be both gratified and extremely relieved if any Russian speakers want to spread it around to people who were active on ЖЖ back in the day and are in a position to safely back up their old content; the offer to help with importing is still open, even if we have to communicate through Google Translate!)

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i quoted and linked to this post on mastodon for awareness if that's alright! link here

i'm too young to have modded LJ comms but i've spent a lot of time archiving old icon posts on my own so i very much appreciate your endeavor!

Thanks!

Man, there's a special kind of nostalgia that comes from digging back into posts you were too young to have been there for, isn't there? (Granted, I'm old enough that for me it's mostly Usenet, mailing-list archives, and ancient BBSes, but still. A surreal experience.)

yeah it's definitely a weird kind of nostalgia, almost like you wish you were there, and that it feels almost familiar, but obviously you weren't there and it's just some sort of false nostalgia mixed in with whatever real memories of the old internet you have. if that makes any sense haha

but i really love looking through icon posts and backing them up, i even wrote a whole post about ripping photobucket icons off lj posts lol (shameless self promo of that because i kinda just posted it into the ether but i might as well share it on a post like this i guess)

Total sense. And there's enough continuity in online culture that some of the norms/slang/discussions are achingly familiar, mixed in with relics you've only heard about or don't even recognize. Uncanny wandering in a partially-strange land.

(There's also the suuuper surreal experience of diving into stuff you could've been there for, but weren't... the Fark 9/11 live-reaction thread haunts me, fascinates me, and every so often unceremoniously body-slams me back to the Bush administration.)

oh gosh i read that thread some time ago since i was curious, and as someone who lives in nyc and wasn't alive for 9/11 it was definitely a surreal read haha

Bless you for saving old icon posts. I recent deleted my icon folder by accident and still pretty heartbroken over it. Will give the photobucket a try later with a mood theme or two :)

thank you, i really appreciate it! the tutorial's a bit cumbersome if you don't know much about command line applications but once you have it installed i think it should be pretty easy to follow :) feel free to comment on the post if you need help ^^

Signal-boosted!

That's a wonderful offer.

Fortunately I could afford to to Bookblogger and pay to get all 7,000+ of my entries back to 2004. It was around $19 and it turned out really nice, so I'm pleased with that.

But I applaud you for helping people for whom that is NOT an option.

tl;dr: due to LJ shenanigans and lying, importing may not work, and just a few wrong passwords in import requests might break it for all DW users trying to import.

https://dw-maintenance.dreamwidth.org/86004.html
https://dw-maintenance.dreamwidth.org/86233.html

I had intermittent success with the importer on a small comm this afternoon, but duly noted that it's fragile & may cut out entirely at some point.

*nod*

(here from the several links to this post that popped up on my feed)

This is a really great reminder! I finally managed to import the last 6 months of my personal LJ last night, but had forgotten about trying to import communities.

I might be missing something about how to do it correctly, though, so wanted to see if you have any advice.

I created a DW comm of the same name as the LJ comm, I'm a maintainer of the LJ, comm, but when I try to import it (working as the DW comm username) I get a fail at the verification step and the error: "XMLRPC failure: Client error: Invalid destination journal username." And given the recent importer instability, I can't tell if that's the importer being broken or me doing something wrong...

I didn't even think about communities. :o
That made me think, I took over moderating one, but then I started thinking, No, I think that was over on Blurty, which sadly never seemed to come back. :(
Hugs, Jon

Hello! I am a mod at the LJ community Spiketara, and I have NO IDEA how to copy it to DW. Could you be so kind as to assist? Or advise me how to go about doing it? I would be so grateful!

Does https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/faqbrowse?faqid=230 help?

Hi. Thanks, but no it doesn't. Where it says, "To import a community, you must be a maintainer or owner (not a moderator) of the community on the other site" is where I am stuck. I'm only a moderator. I've LJ-messaged the comm owner but haven't heard back from her.

Thanks, though. I appreciate it.

*nod* (I think I missed that, and many use that to refer to anyone having some extra power on a community, not just moderation in the narrow, technical sense.)

She hasn't responded to me, the owner, I mean. She may no longer be using that email address that LJ has for her, or may not even be alive. (Hello, pandemic?) I am copy-pasting my chapters - all 53 of them, to documents.

Is there any way a mod can copy a community to DW? There is so much lovely fic in Spiketara, and I never could read it when I was writing my own. I will miss not being able to read all that Spara goodness.

I don't know of any. It may come to the way the LiveJournal client interface the importer uses works now. Since LiveJournal stopped being open-source sometime in 2014, I've lost all visibility of that.

Oh, well. I'm nearly done with my own fic, but all those other writers' fic will be GAWN.

I suppose I can post and ask my remaining f-list to point me to where their fic is archived...

You can use ljarchive to back up all the entries of any community where you're a member. Unfortunately it no longer works on comments, but reports are it will still get the entries themselves, so it should at least save the fic.

(if you need help getting ljarchive to work, someone in these comments can probably help!)

It's the comments I'm mostly interested in. (It was my first big fic.) I've put in a request at LJ Support asking them to treat the community as though it's been abandoned, which I think it is. Asked them to make me owner. Sure hope they do. They've probably got a ton of support requests right now...

Yeah, they've probably got a ton of support requests. They are also probably way more panicked than we are about what's going to happen to the Russian internet/tech economy in coming days and also dealing with like, censorship requests from the FSB about literally everyone on the Russian-language site and whether they're all going to Siberia just for owning LJ and/or getting their yachts confiscated, so I really don't blame them if Anglo fandom panicking yet again isn't their top concern rn.

I just can't feel too sorry about their going to Siberia or getting their yachts confiscated. Russia is the reason we're all in this pickle.

I mean I am certainly not feeling a great deal of pain for the oligarch owners of Ramblr Media Group, but the individual staffers who have managed to keep Russian LJ alive for average Russians after all this time and its reputation as an independent social media site for troublemakers have my sympathy. Even if they haven't generally been able to do a great job of it.

(I think maybe a lot of people have forgotten/don't know the beginning of this story? LJ is owned by Russians in the first place because it has a huge Russian userbase and in the early 2000s was home to a lot of the loudest anti-Putin voices in Russia. More of that than you'd think is still up if you know how to navigate Russian LJ. LJ's owners are not worried about the English fan fiction, they care about the Russian dissident bloggers. And in some cases, the Russian dissident fan fiction. I also care about the Russian dissident bloggers and the Russian dissident fans. Russian fandom is going through some shit right now as you'd guess.)

Edited 2022-03-12 04:23 (UTC)

I think maybe a lot of people have forgotten/don't know the beginning of this story?

That would be me. I've been around since 2003(?) but didn't really know much. Of course I support the anti-Putin Russians. This is such a mess. I mostly blame Putin, may he rot.

Point of further clarification: I modded, at least for a while, one specific LJ comm that I wouldn't mind archiving. However, I want nothing to do with the queerphobic ToS that LJ's made a point of everyone agreeing to before usage, so am not logging in over there, even for archival purposes. Is there anything I can do at this end *without* agreeing to those queermisic terms, or am I stuck?

I suspect you can't. I think I had to agree to them just to delete my account.

Well, shells. :( I was afraid of that.

If you need help doing this and don't mind teaching me how, I'm happy to help you.

I was wondering about https://doctoreleven.livejournal.com/, do we know if that has been backed up/imported? I loved that comm.

(And have dutifully imported the Buffy comm I myself created/modded back in the day. Thanks for the reminder!)

I'm wanting terribly to do this, but I'm not the 'owner' of the two LJ accounts/communities I want to back up. For now, I've downloaded as html and will be reposting the works (co-written with another person I'm not able to contact right now) on AO3, but I would really like to preserve comments, too.

It's frustrating that I can't back up comms I helped build and maintain. Grrr! Guess we should have been co-creators or something.

Thanks for the info!

I have boosted the signal for this; it's good advice.

Hi there! It's possible to export LJ communities (and journals) in batch, together with comments, using this Python script: https://github.com/arty-name/livejournal-export . I did it and it works fine, very fast and clean, as it uses LJ's own API. It exports to a set of files on your computer, in several formats: xml, json, markdown and html, so it's even convenient to read.

It requires to copy/paste two cookies from your browser's settings into the file auth.py (so the site thinks that you're logged in, and you don't have to go through the process of logging in.) The ljloggedin cookie can be found under livejournal.com and ljmastersession - under www.livejournal.com. Both cookies are required. It might take a bit of effort to find them both, but they are there.

Also, edit download_posts.py to specify the range of years.

By default, it exports your journal. To export a community, you have to log in as the owner (or a mod? I only had one community there), and add "?authas=" to the URLs in download_comments.py and download_posts.py. e.g.
https://www.livejournal.com/export_comments.bml?authas=oldware

(Hope this helps! I found this post via

ysabetwordsmith, that's why this comment is so late... Hopefully LJ didn't ban the API access yet.)

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Open call to anyone still listening - archiving old LJ comms

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In case you missed those

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Thank you!

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