I stirred up some livejournal drama by loosening the posting restrictions on a community I maintain there. It’s a bit like herding 5000 cats, but each of those cats is trying post all the huge 10 megapixel images they have on their hard drives, and linking to their etsy shops in multi-coloured flashing glittery scrolling text. They also would like to repeat this procedure every single day…

Many years ago, when the community was young, I set up a number of simple rules to follow, and posted them openly in the community’s information for all to read.

“EDIT: LOOK! They even had the nerve to check my personal LJ AND comment. Tsk-tsk… “

It’s livejournal, and if you don’t want your shit read, or commented on, you have the ability to restrict who can read or reply to it. I had simply replied to her snarky post in her own journal with a simple comment that I hadn’t been absent from moderating. There’s no magic border that prevents people from replying to your posts unless you set it up.

I deleted one of her posts today, it would seem, along with a handful of others. I had changed the posting rules not that long ago, and made things a bit looser in favour of more frequent posting and set a hard limit on image height and width.

I went through a couple dozen posts earlier, and deleted a couple after commenting on the offending entries with “Image too big” or “Posting too frequently.” That’s it, that’s all.

Then I pop by a bit later and there’s a huge “FUCK YOU” at the top of the page; someone posted to the community with just those two words in huge letters. So, I deleted that post, and in community history making, I awarded the very first life-time ban. Anybody I’ve banned before could simply email me at the address provided and say “Can I be unbanned” and they’re back in, even if they’re a repeat offender. Sometimes a ban is the only way I can get their attention, as many of the people posting there don’t read comments to their posts.

Then of course there’s someone stating how they could have me executed by Russian snipers under the LiveJournal TOS. Well, they may as well have suggested that, because the clause she quotes doesn’t mean what she thinks it does. She cites XVI.1 MEMBER CONDUCT as the source of the potential sniper-based elimination, somehow despite the fact that she couldn’t have possibly read the TOS

Even though I didn’t say anything unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortious, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libelous, invasive to another’s privacy, hateful or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable?

I know some of you must be shocked by that, but I can’t take anything said by any of the members of that community very seriously, especially when they speak the crazy.

They disappeared off the face of the community for god only knows how many months, then suddenly came back with a whole slew of new rules, and expected EVERYBODY to notice them. HAHA!

That’s why I didn’t ban her at first… the rules are new and I was being nice by also leaving a comment to explain why I was deleting it. Can’t win for trying; maybe I’ll just move to moderated posting.