Quick mod note on the comment/spam policy LJ has initiated

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

I see it popping up all over the place now, and I just figured I'd fill y'all in:

LJ has instituted a new policy to deal with the Russian spam attacks - there's apparently an internal whitelist for URLs, and if a comment has a link that is not part of that internal whitelist, the comment is immediately screened and needs to be reviewed by a moderator in order to be seen by the general community.

The bad news is that in a discussion community such as this, links will come from all sorts of places that might not make the whitelist. The good news is that LJ has offered community and journal owners the ability to turn off this feature entirely. We've done so here, so if you're in other communities and seeing your comments get screened as spam, it should no longer happen here. If, for whatever reason, your comment is getting screened based on this, let us know at the special reporting thread and we'll be glad to deal with it.

Thanks again for making this the go-to spot for solid political discussion on LJ!

Comments

[blueduck37.livejournal.com]

In Soviet Russia, LiveJournal spams you!

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

Lol, looks like the LJ staff are wandering in the wild about how to deal with these things. White-lists? Come on... How extensive can a white-list possibly be?

[a-new-machine.livejournal.com]

Yeah, exactly the opposite of how it should work. Blacklists have problems being comprehensive, but at least it's founded on the right assumption - that you can't possibly know where good content will come from, but you *can* identify particular sources of bad content.

[stewstewstewdio.livejournal.com]

We've done so here

Turning off the option should probably work out better here than most communities because the community rules prohibit linking back to our own user accounts. As a result, there is less of a chance of getting circular links that could cause a problem.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

We're also pretty active on the mod side of things - I can see where abandoned communities would have an issue, but that's not the case here.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

"the community rules prohibit linking back to our own user accounts"

Not exactly.

6. Posts that solely include an advertisement of either a LJ community, a personal LJ blog or a commercial product will be removed. Mentioning these as part of the narrative is fine though, as long as that's not the sole purpose of the post. Same applies for campaigning for a cause.