PSA - Livejournal changes

[the_lady_lily]

I am guessing that everyone has already seen the news post, but let me share it anyway - Livejournal now lets you crosspost to Facebook and Twitter.

The problem here is that it appears to let you post comments on locked posts over to said accounts without the account owner's permission. Which, you know, kind of sucks. The LJ team have yet to confirm this security loop actually exists, but obviously the possibility that it is there is rather worrying. Ah, I see some brave soul has done testing. Yes, it is possible to crosspost a comment you make on someone else's locked entry and thus potentially reveal the content of said entry without the consent of the journal owner. Fail. Faily faily fail. Plus obviously not all of us want the crossposting functionality.

Given just how many people are being Righteously Irritated at this, I suspect quick coding changes in the near future. However, if you are feeling this is suboptimal, do stroll over to the post I've linked to above and leave a comment explaining precisely why this is a Bad New Feature.

If you would like to read something that talks about the tech end a wee bit more, obviously the comments of the post are full of it; alextiefling has a friends-locked post on the topic; karohemd has a public one.

In case you are wondering - no, I am not planning on crosspost to Facebook and Twitter. No, I will not crosspost comments from my blog, your blog or anyone else's blog. If I find the functionality allows anyone to crosspost material that I consider delicate and that someone is exploiting that loophole, I will be Incredibly Unimpressed.

Edit: Minor clarification - I do already import my public LJ entries over to Facebook via their post-harvest thingummie, as those of you on Facebook will have noticed. Those, however, are book and film reviews, and the odd bit of politics or classics promotion. That would be why they are public.

Comments

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

I do love LJ, but you have to wonder what they're smoking sometimes. Amazingly, on the very same day they've done this, they have also ceased to support tags with a forward slash in them. Because apparently they somehow don't realise that they are the hosting site of choice for a very large number of communities who have been tagging their posts "snape/harry" and so forth for years. It is almost like they are trying to piss off as large a proportion of their users as they can manage.

I suspect both changes will be swiftly overturned, as you say. But it actually scares me that right now, I could write whatever I like about you in this comment, including your real name, and then cross-post it to FB and Twitter along with a link right back to this post. Obviously, I'm not going to do that, even on a public post. But we should not all suddenly be so heavily reliant on the good sense of our friends to stop that happening.

[happymartian.livejournal.com]

I have a feeling this won't be around for long. Every once in a while lj attempts to go more facebook and it always seems to fail. For now, though, see user icon, possibly with a few exclamation marks.

[iris4700.livejournal.com]

posted.